Linux gamers owe a debt of gratitude to kernel developer Andy Lutomirski for his recent work getting 32-bit programs to run faster on a 64-bit kernel, said Greg Kroah-Hartman during the Linux kernel panel today at LinuxCon and CloudOpen North America.
“A lot of people thought, who cares? It turned out Valve cares,” Kroah-Hartman, a Linux kernel developer and Linux Foundation Fellow, said. All of their games are still 32-bit applications but Valve wanted them to run on the 64-bit architecture, he said.
“You just sped up all the gamers,” Kroah-Hartman said on stage to enthusiastic applause. “You made their machines run faster without realizing it. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” said Lutomirski, a relative newcomer to kernel development.
Kroah-Hartman, who moderated the panel discussion, was joined on stage by Linux Creator Linus Torvalds as well as kernel developers Andrew Morton from Google, Shuah Khan from Samsung, and Lutomirski, a co-founder of AMA Capital Management. Their discussion covered a range of topics from the top challenges facing the kernel community, to the toughest bugs they’ve fixed and everything in between. Here are some of the highlights of the discussion, below. The full session is available below and on the Linux Foundation YouTube channel.
1. “I downloaded the 2.2 kernel only to discover that Alan Cox had marked my network driver obsolete. So I decided to make it unobsolete which involved about a 2,000-line patch and 5,000-line changelog.” – Andrew Morton on his first patch.
2. “We had the Kernel Summit over the past few days and it seemed pretty boring. We weren’t arguing anymore… (Disagreement from the panelists.) Wait, we were?” – Greg KH.
3. Greg KH : “Containers are not secure natively, you have to use namespaces, yet we keep finding bugs in (namespaces). Are they ready to use?”
Lutomirski: “It’s a tradeoff. If they’re off you have a security problem. If they’re on you may also have a security problem. At least the rate of severe bugs seems to be decreasing over time so that’s reassuring.”
4. “We’re trying to extend our interfaces to the point that you can safely run code that you traditionally absolutely could not as root.” – Linus Torvalds, on namespaces and container security.
5. “I’m too old to fix bugs nowadays. My first response is, who can I manipulate into fixing this?” – Andrew Morton.
6. “I’d love for Linux to shrink again… We’ve clearly been bloating up the kernel a lot over the past 20 years…. It’s a problem if we want to push the envelope into embedded devices, in particular.” – Linus Torvalds.
7. “Lots of ARM stuff is coming in, so for the next few years that will be a challenge. A lot of people will want to leverage drivers built on ACPI and use them in the ARM space.” -Shuah Khan.
8. “Projects like Raspberry Pi were actually great at seeding random people with hardware… and very few of those will necessarily decide to do kernel development, but if you seed the world a small percentage is still a lot of people.” – Linus Torvalds.
9. “I’ve had a patch rejected because it’s overly complicated… the x86 maintainers have been amazing about this… It makes the development take a little bit longer in the short term… but it’s much more effective as a long term strategy.” – Andy Lutomirski.
10. GregKH: “We’re running really well. We’re running everywhere. Where are we going next? We’ve conquered pretty much every major industry.”
Linus Torvalds: “I still want that desktop.”
OpenStack is the most popular open source cloud project, followed by Docker and KVM, according to a survey of more than 550 respondents conducted by Linux.com and The New Stack and announced today at CloudOpen in Chicago.
The results reflect the rising popularity of a new generation of open source projects that for the most part are less than five years old and aimed at meeting the growing enterprise demand for cloud computing infrastructure. In turn, these young projects are showing favor but the strength of the more solid technologies have a certain degree of longevity that is also reflected in the results.
The survey, conducted on SurveyMonkey over a two-week period in July, asked respondents to choose the best 
open source cloud project in five different categories, which included the following:
Respondents were also asked to provide what they viewed as the first, second and third best open source projects overall. A weighted score was reached by the following formula to determine the top projects:
Number of first choice votes x3
+ Number of second choice votes x2
+ Number of third choice votes
= Total score.
OpenStack was the most popular choice with 389 points (72 first, 68 second, and 37 third choice votes). Docker received 284 total weighted points, making it second best overall. KVM had 212 points, making it the third most popular open source project. (See the chart, above, for the top 5.)
OpenStack had the most contributors weighing in on the survey and has been growing quickly. Fewer respondents said they contribute to Docker but it’s the project everyone said they want to contribute to more. They’re hot. The totals show the strength of such newer projects. OpenStack is the open source cloud software project started four years ago. Docker is less than two years old but has already established itself as one of the fastest growing open source projects of all time.
In the hypervisor category, KVM received 48 percent of the vote, followed by Docker with 28 percent. It is interesting to note that Docker was chosen by more respondents than Xen, which received 15 percent of the vote. Xen is an established hypervisor used in some of the world’s largest and most sophisticated cloud services. Docker, in contrast, is less than two years old but has seemed to carry enough influence to make it one of the most important open source projects of the past 20 years.
OpenStack was the clear favorite among IaaS platforms with 63 percent of the vote, followed by Apache CloudStack with 18 percent. Among PaaS platforms, OpenShift was the clear winner with about 54 percent of respondents choosing it over CloudFoundry which had about 36 percent of the vote.
Respondents were also given an option to list their platform of choice not listed under ‘other’ category. Among IaaS platforms, there were a handful of platforms different from the four choices provided (OpenStack, CloudStack, OpenNebula & Eucalyptus), making up about 2 percent among total responses. Among PaaS platforms, write-in alternatives to OpenShift and Cloud Foundry made up to 10 percent of responses, though not all were open source projects. For example, Marathon and AppScale were two write-ins listed multiple times. Heroku was also commonly mentioned but it’s not open source.
Both OpenShift and Cloud Foundry reflect the market’s immaturity. Developers are starting to use PaaS these two offerings are dominated by large enterprise companies. The real change may come with a new breed of PaaS providers that are using Docker, namely, they’re open source and designed to let users run their own PaaS.
This indicates a still-early stage of PaaS platforms, with clear indication towards the dominant two platforms.
Puppet had 23 percent of the vote and was rated the most popular provisioning/ management tool, followed by Ansible with 18 percent. Salt Stack received 13.3 percent of the votes cast and JuJu squeaked past Chef with 10.7 percent compared to Chef with 10.4 percent. Ansible and Salt Stack’s strong showing illustrate the demand for a higher level of automation in cloud scale environments, compared to the more traditional configuration management 
systems.
Ceph lead the storage category with 49.6 percent of the vote. Gluster came in second with 20 percent and Swift had 17 percent of the vote cast. Riak CS from Basho had 10.2 percent of the vote
Unsurprisingly, the quality of the community and openness were rated the most important deciding factors in choosing the open source projects for each category. Each of these factors received 55.3 percent of the vote. Performance with 51.6 percent and security with 50 percent were rated as the next most important factors. Flexibility had 49 percent, relevancy, 45 percent and maturity of a project played a factor in 43 percent of the vote, while size of the code base received 36 percent, reflecting the desire not just for trust but for richness of the project, too.
Interestingly, 27 percent of the respondents said they do not contribute to open cloud projects, which may reflect the fact that most participants in these projects represent their companies as a voting block. They represent a powerful part of the open source community but are smaller overall in terms of the total number of participants.
Among the respondents, OpenStack had the most contributors, with 17.2 percent of respondents saying they contribute, followed by CloudStack with 12 percent of respondents contributing. OpenStack also saw the most use, with 13 percent of respondents choosing it as the project they work with the most, followed by CloudStack (11.5 percent), KVM (10.5 
percent) and OpenShift (7.3 percent).
Approximately 47 percent of the voters cited poor documentation as the biggest challenge contributors face while deploying the projects they use the most. In second, 38.8 percent of the voters said complex installation steps posed the biggest challenge, followed by difficult configuration management with 22.7 percent of the vote.
Github is the most popular development platform, with about 67 percent of respondents using it. Text editors are still a rage, with 60 percent of respondents making use of them, while only about 32 percent using full-fledged development platforms. A sad 3 percent of respondents don’t use any source control mechanism at all!
Docker is the open source project that most respondents said they would like to contribute to, with 21 percent responding so indicating the popularity of the Docker open source project. Among the contributors, about 42.5 percent were independent contributors.
Survey results illustrate that OpenStack and Docker are clear winners of mindshare among open source cloud projects. They also emphasize the need for correct and valid documentation, along with easier deployment options. Finally, they also show a non-trivial percentage of independent contributors making an impact.
OpenStack and Docker will continue to dominate the open source cloud discussion. But Docker may prove to gain the most as it is also breeding a diverse ecosystem of open source projects. OpenStack is primarily contained (no pun intended) to the development of its own cloud operating system. It does integrate with OpenShift, for example, but for the most part the different groups within OpenStack do the lion’s share of development. Docker’s influence is such that it is affecting the overall open source community. The projects that are closely tied to Docker, such as Ansible, will continue to grow as developers seek tools to use with the fast growing container technology.
With the growing potential of Docker, it’s becoming clear that the future of at least some of the data center is going to be containerized. But there are still challenges in getting containerized applications deployed and managed across real and virtual hardware.
