[Bioclusters] Clueless about Mosix

[Vsevolod Ilyushchenko]

Hi,

I have looked at the available information about Mosix (prompted by Ivo,
for those who know us :). Surprisingly, neither their site nor their
distribution contains much in the way of detailed description, so I had to
hunt around. I still have some questions which hopefully somebody can
answer:

1. I kinda understand how Mosix migrates long-running CPU-intensive
processes, but how does it distinguish between user programs (blast) and
administration commands? If I run ifconfig, sar or dmesg on the master
node, do I get the output from the master or from a random slave?

2. There are two types of MFS, right? One is "better NFS", which has
similar semantics but somehow better throughput (how?). Another, called
MFS/DFSA, is a network parallel filesystem similar to PVFS or GFS. Is this
correct?

3. How easy it is to "turn Mosix off"? Can I simply reboot into a non-Mosix
kernel on all nodes, or will I also have to take care of inittab and other
files which Mosix modifies?

Thanks,
Simon
-- 
Simon (Vsevolod ILyushchenko)   simonf@cshl.edu   
http://www.simonf.com          simonf@simonf.com 

The central message of Buddhism is not 
"every man for himself"!
				("The Fish Called Wanda")