Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft : Hank Janssen, PHP

More on the Hyper-V Linux Integration Components

hjanssen — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 20:24:00 GMT

Well, there is no easy way to say this, so I am simply going to start this blog with the following line.

Microsoft just submitted source code for the Hyper-V Linux Integration Components to the Linux Kernel Community Under GPL v2.

Well, there's a conversation starter! Are you still all sitting in your chairs???

Let me summarize:

Yes, our device driver code was released directly to the Linux Kernel
We released the code under GPL v2
We are working with Greg Kroah-Hartman so it is ready for the next release of the Linux Kernel, version 2.6.32
We will continue to update the driver code to enhance interoperability on an ongoing basis, but it's our hope that other developers in the community will find the code useful and worthy of collaboration.

Fallen off your chair yet?

Microsoft developed the Linux device drivers to enhance the performance of Linux when virtualized on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V. My team and I were responsible for testing and validating the driver components that were contributed for this first release.

Now, my team and I will be responsible for further developing this code going forward. (Yes, that does mean that I have gone back to leverage my very early roots as a Kernel programmer. Let the world be warned!!!!). Haiyang Zhang has been working on this code with me, and he will continue to work with me on this going forward.

When I joined Microsoft three years ago, the primary reason was to put my money where my mouth was. You see complaining about something is easy, but it becomes a little more complicated when somebody offers you the opportunity to be part of helping change what you have complained about.

So, three years after taking the job that made me put my money where my mouth was (and still often is!), I for one am EXTREMELY happy to see one of the most significant fruits of our work here in the Microsoft Open Source Technology Center (OSTC). But I have to say, even I would have been hard-pressed to think three years ago that we would consider contributing to the Linux Kernel.

As you know, two years ago Microsoft announced a partnership with Novell, and Tom Hanrahan ran the lab on a day to day basis till about 9 months ago. Since then I have had the pleasure of running the technical side of the execution of that lab under Tom Hanrahan for the OSTC. One of the primary tasks for that lab is to make sure Windows runs well on top of XEN and Linux runs well on top of Hyper-V, and we do this in very close cooperation with Novell.

We do most of this work as an extension to Mike Neil's Hyper-V team.

As part of this, we were asked to help develop and maintain a crucial part of this work called the Linux Integration Components. This code is designed so that Linux can run in an "enlightened mode" on top of Hyper-V (enlightened mode is roughly the Hyper-V equivalent of "paravirtualized mode" for the Xen hypervisor). Without this driver code, Linux can run on top of Windows, but without the same high performance levels. It is this device driver code that we are releasing today, directly to the Linux Kernel.

We're not talking a few hundred lines of code here; we're talking about roughly 20,000 lines of code.

Is this a Dump and Run from Microsoft? Absolutely not! We plan to enhance the functionality of this code, and we will continue to work with the Linux Community to support the drivers and to ensure continued interoperability.

As you can imagine, this was the result of a lot of hard work: Hiyang Zhang, who has been co-writing this code; Hashir Abdi, who has been testing all this stuff; as well as Vijay Tewari and Mike Sterling from the Hyper-V team who have been taking care of the Hyper-V side.

And last, but certainly not least, Greg Kroah-Hartman, who has been helping me to make all this code land in the right area in the kernel. He has patiently worked to help me correct my obvious mistakes and to get the code contributed into the kernel.

So where are we today? Well, Greg Kroah-Hartman will make the code visible to the outside world today. (For those who want to get a head start, the code will sit under <your kernel tree>/drivers/staging/hv). After it becomes visible, I will write a few more blogs this week that should help you to understand, build and run them.

The titles I am thinking for these blogs are:

Where do the Linux ICs reside in the kernel tree and how do I build them?

And

How do I install, configure and run the Linux IC's?

I had almost forgotten how wrapped up you can be once you start writing code again. So I have not gotten much sleep this past week, but it has been a joy to get back into coding again!

PHP|Tek in Chicago

hjanssen — Thu, 28 May 2009 00:29:00 GMT

Last week I got the perfect excuse to get out of the Planning and Budget process that we are going through right now, attending PHP|Tek, which was a welcome escape as planning and budgeting in any company is usually enough fun to make a grown man cry!

So last week I went to PHP|Tek in Chicago to speak and meet folk from the PHP community. As always, I greatly enjoy meeting the people who write and use PHP, and I have been to and spoken with enough of the speakers at past events that I know a lot of the core people by first name.

Kind of funny that we now have gotten to the point inside of Microsoft that we are almost old hats at Open Source conferences

There were two days prior to the conference where a group of core PHP developers and community people talked about the state - past, present and future - of PHP. It was super cool to be invited to that one!

Unfortunately I was only able to join one of those two days: amazing that flying from Seattle to Chicago takes the better part of a day!

The discussions there where very wide ranging, from whether there will be a PHP 5.4, what 6.0 will bring, which bugs are current show stoppers, where PDO is going, etc. etc.

For me PHP|Tek remains a very nice ‘community' conference, where the focus is on the community of PHP and not the business/vendors of PHP.

These kinds of conferences are the best way to network, and it would take too long to talk about all the people I spoke to. But Elizabeth Smith and I talked about us writing documentation for php.net (I have been wanting to write the ‘how to build PHP for Windows' part) so hopefully look for more documentation written by Microsoft for php.net soon.

As always I talked to a lot of the usual suspects: Scott MacVicar, Andrei Zmievski, Derick Rethans, Sebastian Bergmann, Chris Shiflett, Cal Evans and others.

Oh, and if you are really bored, check out the latest May issue of php architect, which has a bunch of really cool articles about PHP and Windows. Some of them were even co-written by me, which gives you an idea how far php | architect has sunk to have people write articles for them

I just checked out the Website, and the May issue is not posted yet. But everybody who attended PHP|Tek got a copy of that issue in their goodies bag.

I always enjoy giving sessions and the session I did give at PHP|Tek was ‘PHP 5.3 The best PHP on Windows Yet' , and I got some really good feedback. I think I had about 40+ people in my session. People are always surprised to see Microsoft's involvement with PHP and what we have done with the community so far.

It is a talk I have given before. It starts with describing what the organization I belong to (the Microsoft Open Source Technology Center) does and how we work inside of Microsoft. After that I go into some detail about why PHP 5.3 is the best PHP on Windows.

Did you know that, for example, with PHP releases prior to 5.3, the code was build with libraries that were more than 10 years old and for which nobody really had any idea where the source code went? So it was built - linked rather - with object files that were more than 10 years old.

It makes it really hard to fix/improve stuff that you do not have the source code for

Well, pretty much all the issues of the past are now gone. I will make sure I write a blog about what truly went into PHP 5.3 for Windows soon, if the budgeting and planning process doesn't kill me before that point. In the meantime, here is a link to phpfreaks where, a few weeks ago, I posted a bunch of what we have been doing.

One really interesting thing is that there were a lot of Microsoft people at this conference, specifically from the DPE (Developer Platform Evangelism) side of Microsoft.

These are the people who are very much field and customer focused. From my conversations with them, they enjoyed the conference and were glad to get the opportunity to speak with a lot of the OS crowd. It is amazing how much we all have in common once we talk about technology.

Thanks to the people who put on the conference: of course Marco Tabini, the man behind PHP|Tek, but especially Elizabeth Naramore, who is the unsung hero that is the real driver behind keeping PHP|Tek running smoothly!

On the Road in Europe - Take 1

hjanssen — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 16:25:00 GMT

Today is Tuesday - That must mean I am in Mainz. I am on day 12 of my European trip. I was in Rome and Amsterdam last week.

In Rome I attended the Moodle conference, which was pretty cool. It was put on by Roma Tre and was one of many destinations in which Moodle held conferences this past month. I went to talk to Martin Dougiamas, Helen Foster and Petr Skoda as part of our ongoing quest to get PHP on Windows to be the best experience possible.

The deployment numbers that Martin showed in his presentation are quite impressive! I have been digging around for his presentation to give these numbers, but I can't find them. I am sure that Martin must have posted his presentation somewhere, I just have not found it yet.

But the intention was to start a working relationship with the Moodle community, and this was a great start. One of the most interesting presentations was from the Italian Airforce, who described their experiences in finding better educational tools to train their personnel, and settled on Moodle to be a large part of that. It is always interesting to have a General in the audience.

It is really amazing to see how and where Moodle is used. It is a testament to the intention of Moodle and Martin and the Moodle community that is has become so popular.

The other thing I did was meet with a lot of open source influential's/Government/CTO/Journalists etc. Microsoft Rome asked me to give a bunch of presentations and interviews, which I love to do, but it turned into a 17 hour-long gauntlet. And I just want to go on record and say that I cannot be held accountable for what I talked about the last 4 or so hours of that day. It became a little blurry at that point.

The bad thing about these trips is that I am away from home for a long period of time. The really good thing about doing these trips is that I get to meet so many people. It is really cool to see the faces and have the dialogues when I talk about what Microsoft is doing in the OS world. By far it is very positive.

But I get the biggest bang for the buck when we have discussions on what people do, and want, from the OS and from Microsoft. We have been doing more and more in the OS world, but unless we work closely with the community we have no idea if we are on the right track.

One of the questions I asked in Rome in a meeting with government officials and OS influential's was ‘what does open source mean to you?' There were many responses, and most of them followed the same line. Some of the common responses where: sharing knowledge, collaboration, personal recognition, information that is easy to get to, allocation of rights, intend to make communications possible.

Well, for the next few days I will be at the IPC in Mainz. So I will blog more tomorrow. There are a lot of things we are doing right now, so I have a lot of content

Hank Janssen & John Bocharov: Introduction to SQL Server Driver for PHP (SQLPHP)

jcannon — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 18:14:00 GMT

Our own Hank Janssen gives the Channel9 team an update on the work that has been done to provide a native driver to SQL Server for PHP.

"SQL Team Says:
"The SQL Server Driver for PHP (October 2007) Community Technology Preview (CTP) is designed to enable reliable, scalable integration with SQL Server for PHP applications deployed on the Windows platform. The Driver for PHP is a PHP 5 extension that allows the reading and writing of SQL Server data from within PHP scripts. It provides a procedural interface for accessing data in all Editions of SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2000 (including Express Edition), and makes use of PHP features, including PHP streams to read and write large objects."

Wow. This is cool. Need to find out more about this. What exactly is this thing? Why did we create it? What are the platform requirments? Is it open source? Who are the folks behind this? You know the C9 drill. Tune in and meet SQLPHP Program Manager John Bocharov and Microsoft Open Source champion Hank Janssen who answer a bunch of questions and provide good context about the thinking behind SQLPHP, history and future. Check it out.

PHP SQL Server drivers, much improved IIS support for PHP - what is this world coming to!

hjanssen — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 22:15:00 GMT

Yes I am still alive!

As I write this, I realize that I have been very delinquent with writing blogs. Time has gone by very fast, and I keep on working on more and more things. And before you know it, you look back and months have gone by without any blogs....

But I wanted to write a few things that have happened here in the last few months. As you might be aware, Microsoft has been working very hard on making PHP on Windows a premier experience. And working in the OSSL, my group and I find ourselves in the middle of most of these efforts. And it gives us a great view of the changes that are happening inside of Microsoft (Sometimes with a gentle shove from us )

So, we assisted the IIS team with their FastCGI effort and GoLive release a few weeks ago. (http://www.iis.net/php ) And no less interesting, something that I am particularly proud of is that Microsoft has released a CTP (Community technical Preview) of a native PHP SQL server driver on Windows.

As a result, I was invited to speak at the PHP Zend conference that was held in San Francisco last week, (www.phpcon.com) I have included the presentation for people to see what we talked about. John Bocharov from the SQL server team co-presented with me on stage and showed some of the bits that are now available for download. You can download them directly from the Microsoft download site. (here is a super long URL with the download details and helpful hints for the driver; http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=85F99A70-5DF5-4558-991F-8AEE8506833C&displaylang=en )

As part of the release, we at the OSSL converted phpbb (www.phpbb.com) to run with the native SQL server driver, and I showed phpbb running natively on SQL Server, on stage - which was pretty cool. We are currently cleaning those changes up and will be submitting them to phpbb code base. And....I am looking to see what other popular PHP applications out there we can contribute support to by writing code & integrating the driver.

All this shows a commitment from Microsoft that I am pretty excited to be a part of. I mean....an IIS 6 version of FasCGI with specific support for PHP, FastCGI build into Server 2008/IIS7 with PHP optimizations and now the SQL server driver for PHP on Windows!

What is this world coming to!

A note on the PHP driver, it is like I said - a community preview. Which means we are very much looking for your feedback on how to improve it, and any bugs you might encounter. So please participate as you can to make this the driver you would like to see it be.

Let's see...what else we have we been up to? We have been working with the Apache Software Foundation more, which has been a lot of fun. And in discussions with them to see how we could better work together, I supplied them with 75 MSDN licenses to help them develop on Windows. I am looking forward to continued cooperation with ASF on many different fronts.

The Lab continues to grow in both manpower and equipment, and we now have over 300 Servers to play with. From the old P3’s (very few still left) to the latest in IBM, DELL and HP Blade systems.

I will do my best to be more responsive and blog more. So keep the comments coming! Until the next time……………..
Thanks,
Hank.