Carrier Grade Linux Maintenance

-NAGESH KOLLU

Agenda: 1. Introduction to Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) 2. why CGL over normal Linux and aspects of CGL ? 3. Maintenance of CGL after deployment

Effective monitoring Patching (live Linux patching) Scalability Quality of service Failure analysis tools. Minimize truck rolling Incorporating cutting edge technologies

4.Conclusion

Carrier Grade Linux (CGL)

Carrier grade is referred to networks or infrastructure where hardware and software components are extremely reliable and well tested with proven capabilities.

Carrier grade is a term for public network telecommunications products that have requirement of guarantee of 5 or 6 nines reliability that means system is guaranteed to up 99.999 percent of time, implying a downtime not more than 5 minutes or 30 seconds per year.

Carrier grade system consist cluster of computing units. Carrier grade Linux covers hardware(board support packages), security

,clustering, serviceability and performance requirements of telecommunication carriers.

CGL is open source Linux plus features and tools from CGL providers.

Why CGL preferred over normal Linux

Standard Linux distributions is good for everyday personal computers and non-critical embedded systems like TV’s ,set-top boxes, Phones.

Brief outage and Downtime doesn’t hurt much. Linux kernel missing several features that are needed in telecom

environment such as reliability ,security and scalability. Carrier grade Linux is for carrier grade customers where any

outage hurts big time. It is mainly used in gateways applications, signaling services

applications and Management applications. Using CGL makes faster time to market products.

Effective monitoring

Rapid detection of hardware or software failures requires healthy monitoring. Need to check which hardware units are working and which not ? Detecting abnormal behavior of processes Memory over commit Detecting system errors Detecting network security threats Power monitoring : monitoring power settings based on conditions. Watchdog timers High fault detection for preventing failed node from corrupting shared

resources. Black box recorder or event logging : which provides complete log of system

activity from the beginning till the end.

Patching:

Patching is the most important thing in software industry to update software ,fixing critical errors and new feature enhancements.

Complexity in CGL is we need to do live Linux patching means patching while software and system running.

Security patches : as and when there is a patch or feature that can help counter dos attacks , ID theft attempts and viruses.

Performance improvements.

Scalability

Software architectures doesn’t have to design based on resource limits.

Hot swap insertion and removal of hardware components to increase capacity.

Application portability Disk mirroring

Quality of Service

The cumulative performance of a network is called Quality of service.

Need to monitor bitrate ,throughput ,transmission delay and jitter.

Make use of smart automatic load balancing features to reduce overload protection.

Failure Analysis tools

Remote debugging : support for dynamic debug of kernel and runtime applications.

Kernel panic Handling Support for debugging multi-threading applications. ECC handling

Minimize Truck rolling

The network consists of cables, switches and servers. Detecting location of faulty cables or hardware reduces cost. Field service engineers to fix and upgrade live systems while they

are running.

Incorporating cutting edge technologies

New Features and tools are usually implemented in Linux before they available on proprietary systems.

Linux is supported on multiple platforms like ARM,MIPS, Intel architectures.

It is fruitful to absorb latest tools and features from open source community.

Conclusion:

Carrier Grade Linux support is very important after deployment of products.

CGL provides great support and tools to monitor health of carrier grade systems to recover faulty systems and to upgrade existing network.