[Users] Article on LXC

[Scott Dowdle]

Mihamina,

----- "Mihamina Rakotomandimby" <mihamina at gulfsat.mg> wrote:
> I heard (need confirmation) that openVZ developpers are more and more
> working on LXC development.
> 
> Is that true?

I don't analyse the mainline Linux kernel periodically to see what developers with an @openvz.org email address have been contributing so I don't have any figures for you... but Parallels (the company that sponsors OpenVZ from their Virtuozzo product) has shown up as a top company (in the top 12) and one of their developers has also been in the top 15 of individual contributors to the mainline kernel on a few releases.  So generally speaking, they are big contributors to the mainline kernel.

containers are really the combination of many different features in many different subsytems in the kernel so it may not be obvious that all of the work they contribute is directly related to containers or LXC.  For example, here are some contributions from the last few weeks:

http://lwn.net/Articles/375565/

http://lwn.net/Articles/373994/

http://lwn.net/Articles/374547/

http://lwn.net/Articles/373513/

So far as real stats, some time ago I had an email conversation with Kir Kolyshkin who is the OpenVZ Project manager and I asked how to find out what OpenVZ has contributed and he gave me some commandline tips... that I must admit I haven't followed through on.  The figures he shows in his examples are dated but you get the idea.  Here's the quote:

- - - - -

[my question to him]
> 5) I know that Parallels has been a major contributor to the mainline Linux kernel... and 
> that the company has appeared in the to 10 list a couple of times.  I've seen some blog 
> postings from you on the subject.  Do you have numbers for the last few kernels?  I haven't
> really noticed Parallels mentioned in the LWN weekly kernel page... in the Virtualization 
> and Containers catagory... so I'm wondering if a significant number of the features 
> contributed are more general purpose.  Could you give me a rundown of the kernel 
> contributions contributed by Parallels say... in the last year?

[Kir's answer]
See, it's easy if you have 2.6 git tree:
$ cd git/linux-2.6
$ git pull # wanna latest stuff
....
$ # Here we have all of our guys
$
PAT='@openvz.org|@parallels.com|@sw.ru|@swsoft.com|@sw.com.sg|adobriyan@|kuznet@|gorcunov@'
$ git log --pretty=short --no-merges --since="1 year ago" | grep
^Author: | egrep $PAT | wc -l
866
$ # and the total number of patches is...
$ git log --since="1 year ago" --pretty=short --no-merges | grep
^Author: | wc -l
49684

Now by dividing 866/49684 you'll get about 0.017 or 1.7%. This is
Parallels contribution.

Same thing you can do for any kernel, say let's take a look at 2.6.28:
$ git log v2.6.27..v2.6.28 --pretty=short --no-merges | grep ^Author: |
wc -l
9048
$ git log v2.6.27..v2.6.28 --pretty=short --no-merges | grep ^Author: |
egrep $PAT | wc -l
210

End result is 2.3%.

- - - - -

I hope that gives you enough info to answer your question.  In general, Parallels and OpenVZ have said that they want to get containers in the mainline ASAP so they can discontinue supporting their huge, mature, out-of-tree patch that has no chance of ever being included in the mainline.  Lots of other stakeholders are contributing as well including some developers from IBM, Google, and elsewhere.

TYL,
-- 
Scott Dowdle
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