SIGs’ ballot lifts IMAGE, freeware jobs

Limited voters give HP input on e3000 enhancements

In a process they wrapped up in less than two months, members of Interex Special Interest Groups told HP it should move freeware to supported status for the e3000. But the leading enhancement is a major improvement for IMAGE, one that could increase performance and compatibility.

Balloting on the 2001 System Improvement Ballot (SIB) ended in early April, and the results showed “Make TurboIMAGE thread-aware and thread-safe” got the most votes by about a 30 percent margin over the next ranked item. The enhancement will “allow TurboIMAGE to ‘play well’ with Web and client-server applications,” according to advocates who got the item onto the final ballot.

But there’s a few problems with giving this overall winner of the voting a green light for development. While HP promised to give leading vote-getters serious consideration, the thread enhancement for IMAGE is a high-effort project, in HP’s estimation. That means the improvement isn’t likely to surface anytime soon.

What’s more, the voting process itself turned out only 273 ballots, far from what HP or the SIG organizers hoped for even on a hurried-up schedule. Representatives of the e3000 Commercial Systems Division (CSY) had made it clear the SIB input was only one source of input for 3000 enhancements. The low turnout appeared to reinforce HP’s idea that resources for SIB items will come after other engineering for the 3000.

Voters said they want the e3000 to be capable in the Internet world by casting votes to bundle sendmail, and to provide PHP, openSSL, NTP, and perl support for the system. All are in Open Source or freeware status today for the e3000, but unsupported by HP. Customers want HP to enhance Samba and to improve Java, too; both began as freeware ports before being supported by HP for the e3000.

CSY’s main liaison to the SIGs acknowledged the limited time to vote on the 31 proposed enhancements. “We realize that the process was a bit rushed, and we hope that the next SIB vote can be done allowing more time for discussion and debate,” said HP engineer Jeff Vance. The entire process was compressed into a period from Feb. 12 to April 9. Last year’s nomination and balloting process took three months longer.

But CSY didn’t perform any of the highest-ranked enhancement requests from last year’s ballot, and promises to release some improvements based on this year’s selections. “This year, more so than in the recent past, your votes will influence CSY activities for the next year.” HP said it would announce by mid-May the items it will begin to implement.

Few observers expect the IMAGE thread project to make it onto HP’s selected list of enhancements — in part because CSY didn’t want it on the ballot to begin with. Several SIG leaders said serious debate went on with HP about releasing the thread proposal for final voting, mostly because of the size of the project.

The item was “the only high-effort item to make it to the SIB this year,” said SIG-IMAGE/SQL leader Ken Sletten. “There was more than a little ‘active’ discussion on this one, but in the end the MPE Forum/SIG leader committee that reviewed all items for the SIB voted narrowly to leave it on, and HP did not object.”

Sletten added before the balloting ended that the thread item “likely cannot be finished this year, even if it gets voted high on the SIB, even if HP decides to start on it. But they might start, or start investigating it.”

Some items that scored very well in the SIB’s preliminaries were not allowed to advance to the final ballot. IPSec, a fundamental security plan for security over the Internet, got deferred even though it topped votes in the SIG-Web preliminaries.

“The problem was that it simply wasn’t do-able by HP within the scope of this project,” said SIG-Web chair Michael Gueterman. “CSY did some quick research into it and determined the level of effort necessary to implement it simple made it impossible to do this year.” CSY has tried to set boundaries on what kinds of projects it would consider for the SIB process, noting that less than 25 percent of its engineering resource would be available to such projects.

Gueterman said CSY reported IPSec didn’t fit the SIB profile. “That’s not to say that they don’t want to consider doing it or something like it in the future — but it just didn’t fit in with what they’re trying to accomplish with this vote.”

CSY was analyzing the top 11 voted items at press time, “looking at effort, support costs, available engineering skill match, and overall schedule,” according to HP’s Vance. The second highest item is implementing global user-writeable CI variables, which “would simplify system-wide communication and synchronization between jobs.”

HP considers that project a low-effort one, since much of the design work has purportedly been done. Since it’s related to the Command Interface, it’s squarely within the expertise of Vance, who’s strong-armed several such CI enhancements for the 3000 by himself over long weekends.

Not far behind the CI variable enhancement was the ability to access more than 4Gb of space on LDEV1 disks, the boot devices for the 3000s. MPE/iX limits the amount of disk space that can be used on a boot device, and this enhancement would reduce cost of ownership for customers by making the full capacity of LDEV 1 available for file storage. HP said it would be of “particular benefit to small systems with only two drives,” but added that using LDEV1 for significant storage can have negative performance implications.