Brussels / 4 & 5 February 2017

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Interview with Keith Packard
Free Software For The Machine

Photo of Keith Packard

Keith Packard will give a talk about Free Software For The Machine at FOSDEM 2017.

Q: Could you briefly introduce yourself?

My name is Keith Packard and I have been working on Unix and Linux systems since around 1981. Starting around 1984, I began doing work with the X window system, spent four years at the MIT X Consortium and then the next 20+ years doing X system software work at a variety of companies, including SuSE, Compaq, Hewlett Packard and Intel. In 2015, I started back at Hewlett Packard doing something completely different.

Q: What will your talk be about, exactly? Why this topic?

The something completely different I went to Hewlett Packard to work on was a project called ‘The Machine’, which is a large-scale effort to redefine the nature of computer hardware. Such a large hardware effort needs lots of new software, and the talk I’m giving is all about that software.

Q: What do you hope to accomplish by giving this talk? What do you expect?

I’m hoping to introduce more people to the radical hardware and software changes inherent in The Machine, and show people how they can start to explore what this new computing architecture will do for them.

Q: What’s the history of The Machine? Why did Hewlett Packard start it and how did it evolve?

The Machine program started when people at HPE realized that two new hardware technologies were coming to fruition at about the same time – large scale non-volatile memories and silicon photonics. In parallel with that fundamental research, HPE was working on a new datacenter scale system interconnect called GenZ. The combination of these three suggested a new system architecture that flattens the storage hierarchy across an entire datacenter.

Initial thoughts about software for the machine were that such a large shift in hardware would require a similarly large shift in software. As The Machine was started by researchers in Hewlett Packard Labs, it should come as no surprise that many of them were eager to get the chance to go write a brand new operating system.

Linux was part of the program from the very start, as a stable base for early exploration, but there was a lot of talk about when a new operating system would be deployed to take ‘full advantage’ of the new hardware. As we talked with potential users of the hardware, and got more familiar with how the hardware would actually operate, we realized that Linux would be fully capable of exposing the hardware to applications, at least for the next few years.

Q: The system software for The Machine is based on Debian GNU/Linux. How big was the effort to port Debian to The Machine? What were the biggest challenges?

To Debian, The Machine operates like a cluster of independent machines connected via a traditional network. All of the fancy new memory hardware appears as a peripheral within the system. As such, the changes needed to the core operating system were fairly minor, and focused on providing new kernel modules for the new hardware.

The Machine prototype uses an ARM64 processor, and we’re happy to report that current Linux kernels and Debian user space bits ‘just work’. Bringing up the operating system on the hardware to a shell prompt was uneventful.

On top of the base operating system are a raft of new libraries and system services which are designed to integrate the individual ‘nodes’ within The Machine into a coherent system.

Q: What changes are needed in applications to best take advantage of The Machine’s hardware?

We’ve got several large-scale examples of how to best take advantage of The Machine, and the common theme is to expect fast access to huge amounts of persistent memory, and to expect that sending data between separate computers in the same datacenter can be done for free. Most of the changes make applications simpler as they eliminate communication and explicit serialization/deserialization of data.

Q: Have you enjoyed previous FOSDEM editions?

FOSDEM is a highlight of the year for me. I’ve tried to attend every year since I first came in 2004. I greatly appreciate the time and energy spent in organizing this community-focused event and hope that it continues to delight and inform the free software community for years to come.

Creative Commons License
Creative Commons License

This interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Belgium License.