On Sat, Aug 23, 2008 at 11:34:58AM +0100, Ed W wrote: > OK, several folks have stepped up and offered some funds to buy some > contracting time from Herbert - since he also appears to be at a > temporary impasse to do continue development it seems like a good time > to try and crystalise that. > > I think to make this workable the spec needs to be simple, but also I > have to ask Herbert to be considerate to a situation which is poorly > defined and not easy for businesses to get their head around. > > I propose that the spec is to "advance development of the next stable > vserver release, with the goal of a "released" patch suitable for > production use against kernel 2.56.26 or newer". there are some open issues (mostly missing features) with 2.6.26 Linux-VServer which would make sense to specify here: - the Token Bucket Scheduler wasn't ported yet (need adaptation to the CFS) - Hard CPU Limits are missing (again related to the CFS runqueue changes) - PID spaces require special handling for init-less guests (which is not available in mainline) - the switch to PID spaces will break backwards compatibility, unless we add some compatibility layer (migth be interesting for folks who want to stay with older tools :) - kernel patch breakdown (split patches) and review, to ensure that the 2.6.26+ port is complete those are areas where work has to be done in the kernel, where I think I can put some numbers on further we have a few testing areas which definitely need some love to get to a stable release - cross compile tests for more unusual archs and/or configs need to be done - mainline network namespaces need to be tested and finally integrated > I would request that Herbert offer a private "timesheet" to those > sponsoring the effort to show good faith that the money has been > spent as requested. It might also be sensible to request daily > checkins or patches to some repo again to satisfy any management > types that a real product was produced (details TBA). I hope also > that Herbert will offer us a sensible daily rate for this work since > I suspect it's all off unless we can get a sensible amount of work > done. all those things above are quite easy to verify (even without deep knowledge of the mechanisms) > The sponsorship will be paid 50% up front and 50% in arrears or some > other arrangement agreed privately with Herbert > > Can I ask all those who previously offered funds to get in touch with > Herbert directly and arrange what is reasonable. Herbert can I ask you > to coordinate this and "make it work" if you are interested in the > job? yep, will try to coordinate where possible > I will pledge 1,000 EU to the pot straight away and depending how the > pot looks later I may top that up with an additional sum. Can I ask > everyone else to dig deep and see what we can pony up > Herbert can you please respond with a credible target that we can > achieve. Please understand that many folks will not contribute except > to something with a reasonable fixed price goal and an easily observable > target. So I hope you can describe a goal more concrete than simply > "will spend 2 weeks hacking" ! probably the first 'goal' is to get the PID stuff done, and the second 'milestone' could be the scheduler rework, but I'm open to suggestions how to priorize that ... > I will pick some arbitrary dates and suggest that we "try and wrap this > up by the end of next week". Herbert to come back privately to those > interested with a schedule of work and some estimated times > > Can we make this work? I hope so, but only time can tell ... in any case, thanks for the efford! best, Herbert > Regards > > Ed Wildgoose > http://www.mailasail.com > tel: +44 20 70432832