The Benefit to HP of
Participating in Debian

Bdale Garbee

Open Source & Linux CTO

Hewlett-Packard

Who is Bdale?

First contribution to Free Software circa 1979

First Unix login in 1982, bsd 4.1 on a Vax!

Contributor to Debian GNU/Linux since 1995

significant contributor to 5 ports: alpha, sparc, arm, hppa, ia64

infrastructure contributions from building first master.debian.org to ideas like “package pools” and “flavors”

former Debian Project Leader, participant in current “DPL Team”

SPI board member

HP (Agilent) employee since 1986, Linux since 2001

HP Open Source & Linux CTO

Objective

HP and Community Development

How HP became involved in Debian

What Debian has enabled for HP

Some ongoing HP / Debian activities

HP was one of Debian's earliest and remains one of Debian's strongest corporate sponsors. What does HP get in return?

HP Delivers Open Source & Linux
for the Real World

Complete

Solutions

Freedom &

Flexibility

Industry-Leading, Open Standard Architectures

Deployment with

Confidence

Comprehensive
Linux Ecosystem

Best of Breed Technology

Linux Reference Architectures

Robust HP Services Portfolio Worldwide

Commitment to Open Industry Standards, not proprietary architectures

Maximized Value of Vendor & Partner Independence

Open Source leadership to preserve ‘free’ Linux

Market Leadership

Maximum OS and
ISV Partner Reach

Enterprise-Strength
Manageability

SCO Indemnification

Security and Common Criteria Certification

HP Linux Market Leadership

#1 in Worldwide Linux Server Revenue and Units1 for Past Two Years

#1 in x86 Worldwide and Linux Server Units and Revenue1

#1 in Itanium Unit and Revenue Market Share1

#1 in Disk Storage Revenue2

#1 in SAN Revenue2

#1 in SAP Installations >40%3

1 IDC Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, November 2004

2 IDC Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker, March 2004

3 SAP 2004

1

HP Linux R&D Approach

Embrace Linux for what it is … a disruptive technology

Don’t pre-suppose what Linux can and can’t do

Target areas where Linux fits now

Contribute to Linux development as needed to meet requirements

The ultimate market and use models are not yet known … be nimble!

Participate as a member of the community, consistent with community values and behaviors, to develop enterprise capabilities and robustness on Linux that are of interest to HP

Work with Linux distributions and ISVs to deliver innovative and effective solutions for Linux in the Real World

Corporate Participation

Large companies can make important and valuable contributions to the Open Source community

Conflicting expectations

The first priority of a corporation is profit

The Open Source community is focused on freedom

For a successful partnership to occur...

The corporation must behave as a good citizen of the Open Source community

The community must appreciate and incorporate the corporation's contribution

Continuing importance of community development

Areas of Potential Conflict

Schedule Predictability

Volunteers are less predictable than paid developers

Predictability is more important than specific intervals

Supportability

Obligations vs Dedication

Contracts vs Reputation, Prestige

Documentation

Control

The power and peril of forking

More Areas of Potential Conflict

Intellectual property issues

Understanding obligations (GPL source availability, etc)

Assignment of rights

Patents

Funding developers

Hiring existing Open Source developers

Encouraging current employees to join Open Source development communities

Benefits of Cooperation

Company can focus on adding value

Community gets resources, users, focused bug reports

Companies may fund “unpleasant parts” of a project

Community may choose to “adopt and preserve” a program after company interest wanes...

PARISC Linux Port

By the mid 1990's, PARISC was the only major 32-bit CPU Family NOT running Linux!

Various internal discussions at HP

The Puffin Group, Oct 1998

HP agrees to participate, March 1999

Linuxcare acquires the Puffins

No longer just a "fun" project

Contract to continue porting efforts

HP wanted a complete distribution

Why Debian for PARISC?

Port would be irrelevant without a full distribution

Public message: IA64 replaces PARISC

PARISC port was largely a community activity, not driven by direct HP business needs

Commercial distributors wanted "real" $$

Debian perceived as "a Commons"

Key engineers on project liked Debian...

How HP Engaged Debian

No Forks!

Must be a "real" Debian port

Merge all code upstream immediately

Continue Linuxcare contract

Hire existing Debian developers

Encourage HP engineers to join Debian

Selected investments in Debian features

PARISC port experience led to Itanium and other development work being hosted on Debian

1

Executive Summary of Debian Strategy

Provide a time to market advantage for HP by delivering open source functionality which is not yet available in commercial distributions

“Time to market”

We have hardware and customer requirements that are asynchronous with calendar/distribution vendor driven roadmaps. We wishto help customers succeed with Linux in the window between when we might make support available and when it shows up in commercial distributions.

“delivering open source functionality”

HP is not interested in developing, delivering and managing our own distribution or creating a competitor to commercial OSDs. We are interested in delivering valuable, open source functionality desired by our customers.

“not yet available”

This refers to our tenet that features we develop and deliver early will be fed upstream and accepted into open source and available for commercial distributions should they choose to include them.

Participation in Debian is a primary vehicle for direct community involvement and influencing areas of HP business interest in Open Source & Linux

Functionality

Time Gap

Functionality Level of main Distros

Functionality level required by selected customers

Gap shrinks as market matures

Some Results

Debian 3.0 (woody) was the first Linux distribution to support HP Itanium-2 systems using ZX1 chipset in a stable release, even before hardware started to ship!

HP used Debian to set SpecFP2000 record with rx2600 Itanium 2 server before commercial distros were ready

HP Enablement Kit for Linux is based on Debian

Early PowerBar, carrier-grade servers, and early-access Itanium 2 systems shipped with Debian preinstalled

HP carrier-grade solution for telco market is based on Debian with custom kernel and protocol support

1

HP Telco Extensions

How the solution was selected

Red Hat & SuSE did not meet customer requirements

Features, schedule, support model

HP could offer a Debian solution to meet these needs

Interesting Experiences

Event logging support for customer’s HA support

Customer needed information about all system events to track system and trigger failovers

Linux lacked mechanisms to provide sufficient information

HP added “evlog” – an event logging feature that is part of the OSDL/CGL specification

HP added Open IPMI – to provide application access to all system IPMI events

Real-time requirements for customer applications

Customer required interrupt latency performance within a guaranteed time

However, Linux is not a hard-realtime OS (RTOS)

HP evaluated both “low-latency” and “pre-emption” enhancements to Linux, and decided to incorporate the low-latency support into the Debian kernel

Measurements show interrupts latencies are sufficient for customer requirements

OSPF (Open Shortest Path First) support in Linux

Customer had been using “gated” on Unix platforms for OSPF

Linux support of gated had been abandoned and no longer maintained

Customer considered using a third-party, proprietary OSPF implementation

HP identified a new open source OSPF project – quagga

HP worked with quagga project to incorporate functionality into official Debian distribution

quagga is meeting customer needs for OSPF

1

Hewlett Packard Company
VLSI Design Lab

Challenges

PA-RISC end of life

Move to 64-bits

Price/performance

Application availability

Internal code portability/ 64 bit clean code

HP Solution

HP xw8000 dual Xeon desktop running Debian

HP DL360 dual Xeon compute servers running Debian

HP rx2600 dual IPF compute servers running Debian

HP XP1024 disk array w/12 IPF front ends running HP-UX

Results

Improved Performance

Improved Productivity

Office tools available (Open Office, VMware)

Lower Total Cost of Ownership

"Until people personally experience the benefits of GNU/Linux they are always asking for extensive justifications for moving there. After experiencing GNU/Linux they are always asking why we didn't move there sooner.“

HP Engineer

1

Hewlett Packard Company
VLSI Design Lab

How the solution was selected

Thorough evaluation of hardware vs OS impact on performance, cost, and application availability

Interesting Experiences

Enhanced engineer experience with Linux

Easier OS upgrades and software maintenance

Seamless integration between PA/HP-UX, IPF/HP-UX, IA-32/Linux, and IPF/Linux on the network

Lab is able to run “Red Hat qualified” applications on Debian with appropriate shared libraries.

Very few haven’t run “out-of-the-box”

Able to get them running in less than a day

Duplicate problems on Red Hat system for application support

"I approached porting from HP-UX to GNU/Linux with some fear and trepidation due to the big-endian to little-endian issues. But that turned out to be little trouble with the byte order macros and made little to no difference in performance."

HP Engineer

Some HP Contributions

HP donated hardware (many debian.org servers!)

HP hosting and network bandwidth

HP sponsorship of PARISC and Itanium ports

HP funded legal opinion on crypto in Debian US main

Linux for iPAQ and similar devices, handhelds.org

familiar and intimate, the two iPAQ distributions, are both Debian derivatives!

Ongoing development projects directly and indirectly benefiting Debian

Parting Words

HP is steadfastly committed to Open Source & Linux

HP’s support of the Open Source community is genuine, not manipulative or divisive

HP confidently deploys Open Source & Linux software in our own IT infrastructure

Questions?

Linux is very popular at the edge of the network – web server, file/print server, mail server, firewall, etc.

As Linux has matured, it has gone beyond the network edge and is continuing to make inroads deeper into the data center:

ISVs are standarding their development on Linux

More customers are considering line of business apps on Linux

Linux is going beyond the 1-2 cpu deployments. The 2.6 kernel offers opportunities for greater scalability.

En tant que conseils pour vous pour l’avenir, je suppose qu’il y en a qui sont plus prets que d’autres pour deployer Linux et opensource. Votre presence ici indique deja l’interet sincere.

Mais vous avez toujours le choix de ce que vous utilisez. Je pense qu’il faut considerer quatre choses importantes afin de faire ce choix.

D’abord vous avez un choix de fonctionalite contre prix. Il faut decider a quel point ca vaut la peine d’acheter un produit commercial ou d’utiliser un produit opensource. Le marche aura les deux. Il y a enormement de societes qui developent et qui vendent du logiciel proprietaire qui ont des avantages et benefices qu’on ne trouve pas ailleurs. Mais d’un autre cote, il y a de plus en plus de gens qui commence a sacrifier un peu de fonctionalite, soit parce qu’ils doivent investir ailleurs, soit parce qu’ils ont decide qu’il n’en avaient vraiment pas besoin.

La question de support et d’entretien – est-ce que vous etes pret a tout faire independemment ou faut-il travailler avec quelqu’un, et est-ce qu’il y a un partenaire qui vous fait confiance.

Avez vous les resources pour implementer la technologie que vous choisissez, que ca soit Linux opensource ou bien une solution commerciale?

Enfin, l’integration avec l’architecture existant. Quoiqu’on achete, il va falloir trouver un moyen de l’integrer avec un eco-systeme actuel ou projete. Plusieurs clients choisissent leur infrastructure parce qu’ils ont decide d’incorporer d’autres outils du portfolio qui completent l’ensemble.

Heureusement, l’exercise est stimulant, et le choix plus vaste. Permettez-moi aussi de vous dire honetement que HP est parfaitement qualifié et serait heureux de vous aider ici.

2005-03-09T00:57:06