Gridfinity Blog

I’ve been continuing to update our backend and application systems the past couple weeks. I feel that the whole system has improved a lot recently, and many of the problems people have been experiencing have been resolved. I know that there are still some bugs and features that people have brought to my attention, but don’t worry I haven’t forgotten. Nonetheless, in the next few weeks my focus will be on attracting buyers and bringing them into the system. With this work prioritized, and much development happening on the backend of our service, I just want our members to know that even if you are not able to see it too visibility, Gridfinity development is continuing to stream forward.

Please do continue to let us know about any concerns/questions/issues/requests, and I will get to them as quickly as I can.

Ian

I’ve been working on testing and debugging for Windows Server 2003 and Windows Vista. The virtualization software we are using is working under these systems, so full support will be forthcoming. I’ve made a few updates to the Gridfinity application in order to better handle differences between these systems. What is the most likely issue for those who have been experiencing problems thus far is permissions. In order to run QEMU, the accelerator module KQEMU must be installed, and so Gridfinity attempts to do so. Since this is a driver, it requires administrative privileges to do so. Thus if you are running BOINC as a user without administrative rights, you will run into problems (in Vista, you in general never have administrative rights). Since this only needs to be installed once, you can follow the below steps and continue to run Gridfinity/BOINC as any user.

Download and install the KQEMU module: download here
Run the following command to start KQEMU: net start kqemu
Run the following command to have KQEMU start automatically on further boots: sc config kqemu start= auto

These commands are (effectively) tried by the Gridfinity application if KQEMU is not installed or is not running, and so none of this is necessary if running as an Administrative user. However, if it is already running it can proceed as any least-privileged user.

Hopefully these hints will help resolve some of the existing issues. More details about OS support will be forthcoming.

-Ian

When we first started designing the safety mechanisms of Gridfinity, we quickly recognized the safety and performance of virtualization. This is why we have been requiring VMware installs in order to run our workunits. However, VMware offers it’s own disadvanteges. It is a huge download, it is proprietary and subject to licensing restrictions, we can’t distribute it with either our installer or via BOINC, it can be a pain to automate a background instance of VMware, and it has a relatively difficult format for virtual disks. However, the stability and maturity of VMware, as well as their offer of the free VMware Player made it the clear option for us.

There are a couple of open source alternatives which we looked at. One is Xen, which is quickly on the rise and a VMware alternative. However this will only operate on a Linux system after some modification. The other alternative is QEMU, an emulator of various CPU architectures. Normal emulation under QEMU is very slow, and while QEMU has a module (called KQEMU) that allows accelerated emulation (to near native speed), this module was previously closed-source and under license restrictions. This is why we discarded this option when we began development.

However, in February Fabrice Bellard, the writer of the KQEMU, changed the license to GPL, thus freeing it for public use. After internal discussions, we have decided to switch to QEMU as our primary virtualization option. This will allow most of our users to simply hook up to our BOINC project without having to worry about installing or configuring any other software. There is much less room for bugs in configurations, and it greatly simplifies our backend by allowing us to deal with flat disk images.

As such, all of our users should be aware of this switch that is coming up. Windows users will need to make not changes, and in fact users of 32-bit Windows versions can feel free to uninstall VMware. However, users of 64-bit Windows will need to leave VMware resident, as KQEMU has not yet been ported to a Windows x64 driver (any takers?). Those running Windows x64 should leave VMware installed and will not need to make any adjustments.

Users of Linux will need to install QEMU manually. We require this because the KQEMU module needs to be compiled and installed into your kernel. However, these are common packages for many distributions. For further help getting this set up, visit our Linux Documentation page.

We hope that all of our users will find this transition agreeable and beneficial. If any difficulties occur, please visit us in the forums.

-Ian

By popular request, I’ve added an option to create test workunits. You can find this under the Account Status in the Members section. This should enable you to make sure VMware is installed and working properly. If anyone does get some buggy results, send us an email or post in the forums.

I also discovered a bug in the Gridfinity client that was causing many people to sit on the benchmarking dialog indefinitely. This has been fixed now and anyone desiring to use the Gridfinity client should download the new version, 1.0.5.

-Ian

After some initial comments in the forums, it sounds like there are a lot of things we could do, so we decided to add this status blog to keep everyone abreast of what changes and features we are planning to make. Here is our list of things so far, based on your own input.

• Add project preferences to preferences page
• Support for creating/joining teams
• Add an Option to run a short unpaid test unit to make sure your configuration is working
• Server status page

As these things come online, we’ll keep you updated.
-Ian