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Popcorn Linux
- gberger 7y agoCan someone ELI5 what this is?
- ealexhudson 7y agoIt looks like a multi-node version of Linux - a bit like a MOSIX or something - but without the limitation that the hardware needs to be the same on each node. E.g. you could have one X86, one ARM, one FPGA, and a single app could deploy threads across each of those "CPUs". Equally, I guess it looks a bit like a Java application server in terms of function - applications appear to be compiled to whichever hardware target the application needs to run on. Utility infrastructure like shared memory etc appears to be part of the design, so the underlying hardware systems are as transparent as possible.
- im_down_w_otp 7y agoIt's a single system image [1] platform built with Linux. The main idea being that the OS is running on multiple computers while presenting a single computer abstraction to the other software running on it. You write your program as though it's running on a monolithic machine, and the SSI platform manages it across multiple distributed machines. The concept is more popular in HPC & scientific computing than it is in mainstream IT. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_system_image https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_system_image
- skellystudios 7y agoYou know, this is a great, clear description that they should definitely put on their homepage.
- choicenotchance 6y agoI think their diagram is decent enough to give a newbie on their website an idea.
- amachefe 7y agoaka Linux Cluster. This was very popular concept about 15yrs ago. I have seen telecom servers run in such kind of clusters
- SahAssar 7y agoAre you referring to servers running OTP (erlang)?
- eliaspro 7y agoSounds a bit like a Beowulf Linux cluster from about 20y ago. What's the major difference between the approach of those.
- detaro 7y agoBeowulf was just the idea of making a cluster of cheap commodity hardware using open software, typically not Single System Image.
- nineteen999 7y agoYeah I was thinking this sounds more like MOSIX, but with the added abstraction to handle executing the same code accross different architectures. http://www.mosix.cs.huji.ac.il/txt_about.html http://www.mosix.cs.huji.ac.il/txt_about.html
- natmaka 7y agoIndeed, MOSIX or Kerrighed http://www.kerrighed.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page http://www.kerrighed.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
- willtim 7y agoBeowulf had no shared memory abstraction, programs had to be written using message passing, e.g. MPI. I'm not convinced a shared memory abstraction is a good thing for distribution across machines. Some Beowulf clusters actually had much lower latency interconnects than ethernet, e.g. Quadrics, but we still needed to carefully optimise the traffic. With a shared memory abstraction, such optimisation is out of our hands.
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago1. Natalie Portman 2. Hot grits 3. ... 4. Profit! Maybe?
- Already__Taken 7y agoI can't find it but that sounds like the model a platform company that works with CCP to host EVE online makes. They program one game but they shard different sectors of the universe out to hardware based on demand. They either host it or it was just a tech demo they did with eve online. Wish I could remember it was a super cool job advert, not my skill set though.
- rasengan0 7y agoGreat explanation; I can't stop watching the teaser http://popcornlinux.org/sources/video/sosp-19-tutorial.mp4 http://popcornlinux.org/sources/video/sosp-19-tutorial.mp4
- secondo 7y agoThis is off topic, but it's proving hard to google. What's the significance of the hand gesture the women in the video makes at 1:13 and again at 1:39?
- uryga 7y agolooks like that clip of her is looped, so it might just be a random hand movement that looks meaningful bc you see it twice
- uryga 6y agowow, i sure feel dumb about this now! thank you, sibling commenters who actually know stuff :)
- neeleshs 7y agoIt is a prevalent hand gesture in the Indian subcontinent. Could mean a lot of things, and interpreted along with the facial expression. In this case, it means "That's pretty cool", looking at her facial expressions. It could mean "What the heck is going on?", when accompanied with a different facial expression.
- qubex 7y agoExactly the same in Italy. Weird, that.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- zabil 7y agoIt means "wow, impressive".
- c3534l 7y agoAh! I've been saying we should do this for years now. Everyone in the cloud space is reinventing the wheel when what we need is a cloud OS that abstracts away multiple computers. I can see a bright future for a project like this.
- bobbyi_settv 7y agoIn mainstream IT, you'd usually set up a Hadoop or Spark cluster on the machines and then write your code to run against one of those. What's the advantage of this approach over those?
- zekrioca 7y agoAutomatic vertical scaling without changing applications. One needs to rewrite apps in order to get the advantages of Hadoop/Spark/MapReduce in general, and not all problems are solved by simply doing that.. It is a different thing/paradigm, really
- shanavasm 7y agoHow is it different from Mesos - http://mesos.apache.org/ http://mesos.apache.org/ ?
- jbj 7y agoDoes this mean I can expand my thinkpad with one or more raspberry pi boards?
- choward 7y agoYou mean the intro paragraph isn't simple enough? > The Popcorn Linux project is exploring how to improve the programmability of emerging heterogeneous hardware, in particular, those with Instruction Set Architecture (ISA)-diverse cores, from node-scale (e.g., Xeon/Xeon-Phi, ARM/x86, CPU/GPU/FPGAs) to rack-scale (e.g., Scale-out processors, Firebox, The Machine), in both native and virtualized settings. Additionally, the project is exploring how to automatically compile/synthesize/execute code on ISA-heterogeneous hardware. I know some of those words!
- bdcravens 7y agoI think I bingo'ed at least 3 times.
- kroltan 7y agoLet's break it down! (I'm no expert so sorry for any mistakes, and this is simplifying a lot) > improve the programmability of emerging heterogeneous hardware reducing the fiddlyness of developing for mixed hardware > those with Instruction Set Architecture (ISA)-diverse cores those with multiple CPUs speaking different machine code > in both native and virtualized settings both bare-metal and VMs > automatically compile/synthesize/execute code on ISA-heterogeneous hardware automatically translate between the different machine codes. --- Now for what it actually means, is that Popcorn is a single Linux that can simultaneously run on a bunch of different processors (say, your mobile phone, a raspberry, and a desktop) all at once while being used just like a single Linux system to the end-user/programmer. I don't think it's meant to be used by consumers, but for servers or supercomputers, that kind of stuff.
- cbhl 7y agoPairing a big fast processor with a small energy-efficient processor is starting to get more common. You see it in a lot of higher end Android phones. I believe that the Touch Bar Macbooks also pair an x86_64 processor with an ARM coprocessor that runs the touch bar.
- yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago> I don't think it's meant to be used by consumers, but for servers or supercomputers, that kind of stuff. Why would servers/supercomputers care about heterogeneous hardware (including multiple ISAs, even!)? If I'm playing around at home, that's great; I'd love to make a cluster out of a couple of old laptops, an old phone, and a Raspberry Pi. But at work, I'd just... buy a dozen identical servers. Even across generations, x86 is mostly uniform enough to just ignore the changes (with some minor gotchas around extensions, but if you only migrate forward that should be fine too).
- cmeacham98 7y agoThis seems to be old and possibly abandoned, given that: - The website is served using a self signed cert for a different domain created in 2011 (!) - The last download is from March 2013 for linux 3.x - The last commit to the git repo was in 2016 - The last post on the mailing list is an unanswered question from 2015 I would be interested to hear if anybody on HN knows of a similar project that is being maintained.
- christoph-heiss 7y agoThe project seems still alive and active, at least according to its recent RFC'ing from LKML [0]. For some more information, Phoronix also recently wrote an article [1] about it, also the GitHub repo [2] seems to be somewhat active (last commit was 06-02-2020). [0] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/cover.1588127445.git.javier.malave@narfindustries.com https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/cover.1588127445.git.javier.mal... [1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Popcorn-Linux-2020-RFC https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Popcorn-... [2] https://github.com/ssrg-vt/popcorn-kernel https://github.com/ssrg-vt/popcorn-kernel
- cmeacham98 7y agoAh, you're right, it does appear to be still alive. If anyone from the popcorn linux team sees this, please consider updating the outdated portions of your website (and getting an HTTPS certificate). Had I never read this comment I would have gone on unaware that the project was not dead.
- warent 7y agoThe homepage has a "News" section front and center with articles created as recently as March of this year.
- OJFord 7y agoThe homepage (the submission URL as I write, but perhaps you saw something different?) leads with News: - March 2020 ... - [x3] - [big font] October 2019 ... I think it's kicking.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- qubex 7y agoVery interesting... my first (and last) encounter with heterogeneous OSes was back in the mid nineties with TaOS (best reference found online is http://www.uruk.org/emu/Taos.html http://www.uruk.org/emu/Taos.html but the website is rather wonky). Honest question: I’m not the only one who confused this for the Popcorn Time torrent streaming player, am I?
- belzebalex 7y agoYou're not!
- KenanSulayman 7y agoMy first thought was: wow, they took this idea so far now they made an OS out of it.. I imagined an OS preconfigured with torrent clients, easy-to-use VPN client, fancy Netflix-like media center...
- dang 7y agoAn announcement from a few days ago was posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23060692 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23060692 (no comments though) A thread from 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14605882 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14605882
- amachefe 7y agoLinux Clustering OS
- gumby 7y agoI note some comments saying that this is more for HPC. I’ll point out that most mobile ARMs have different kinds of cores on the same die (the so-called big.LITTLE approach), and of course often have utterly different functional units (GPU) as well.
- nunoferreira 7y agoSo joomla + http is still a thing in 2020....
- elcomet 7y agoWhy would it not? It's still very convenient to use a CMS like Joomla for non tech people. Http is a shame of course, nowadays most web hosting providers do it automatically.
- nunoferreira 7y agoMade my first money as web developer in ~2006 with joomla actually
- torartc 7y agoJoomla has never been great compared to its competitors. It's been many years since I've even heard the name. The are tons of better cms platforms no a days
- p4bl0 7y agoVery interesting project, thanks for sharing! The "open positions" page might interest some people here. They have two 2+ years postdoc positions open with no teaching duties at Virginia Tech. http://popcornlinux.org/index.php/positions http://popcornlinux.org/index.php/positions
- zekrioca 7y agoRequirements are a bit overloaded though..
- t3po7re5 7y agoWhoa! I interviewed to work on this project back in my undergrad days. Was wondering what happened to this.
- desktopninja 7y agoName brought back fond memories of SLAX Popcorn Linux. 128MB vs ISO's today that are 1GB+ ... what happened!? PS. This distribution sure does sound like Beowulf
- stargrazer 7y agoKinda like Lustre?
- zekrioca 7y agoYes, kinda.. but lustre is for data, whereas popcorn is for computing..
- lowwave 7y agoSeems to be related to ChronOS Linux at https://www.ssrg.ece.vt.edu https://www.ssrg.ece.vt.edu
- cyborgx7 7y agoFrom the name, I expected this to be a distro for a TV set-top Box to watch movies on.
- peter_d_sherman 7y agoExcerpt: "The project is exploring a replicated-kernel OS model for the Linux operating system. In this model, multiple Linux kernel instances running on multiple nodes collaborate each other to provide applications with a single-image operating system over the nodes. The kernels transparently provide a consistent memory view across the machine boundary, so threads in a process can be spread across the nodes without an explicit declaration of memory regions to share nor accessing through a custom memory APIs. The nodes are connected through a modern low-latency interconnect, and each of them might be based on different ISA and/or hardware configuration." Intuitively, I would think that the way to do this would be as follows: First, we have the memory hierarchy, disk at the bottom, increasingly faster (but smaller) regions of memory closer to the CPU. Now, if let's say a process shares memory across nodes, then what seems to make sense would be moving chunks of that memory, as needed, as "cache blocks" to the local machine that needs it. Observation: That pattern is really not very different than what OS's do with swap files / virtual memory, except that the "swap file" is actually a larger memory region located on a remote node, across the network... Of course there may be other issues with respect to locking, synchronization objects in memory, thread scheduling, etc., etc., but if you got the above memory access pattern right, then you'd go a long way to enabling such an OS...
- dang 7y agoCan you please stop putting "Excerpt" in your comments like that? It's enough to use quotation marks or ">" or some other visual marker to show what you're quoting. The trouble with the way you're doing it is that it signals that the entire comment is an excerpt, and since you've done it a bunch of times, that makes your account look like a single-purpose account or a bot, neither of which are allowed here. I was going to post a totally different reply asking you not to do those things, and then I noticed that actually you're posting normal replies with a nonstandard header.
- peter_d_sherman 7y agoHi Dan, I would like to profusely apologize for using "Excerpt" in my comments for places I excerpt other content, although, I am hoping you'd understand that the reason I do that is for my own way of organizing my own notes... Yes, I understand that HN is a public forum, so in order to please the forum rules and regulations, so from this point forward I will try hard not use "excerpt". Even though I will try not to, if I do it in the future, then understand it was an old habit ingrained upon my stiumulus-response cortex, but nonetheless, I will make a concerted effort not to.