Yet more blog sifting...

Despite there being now four blog entries to sift through the Opening Day entries (one from me, one from Liane, one from Claire and another from me), there are still some great entries that have gone uncategorized. Many of these entries fall into the category of “debugging war stories” – engineers describing a particularly tough or interesting bug that they nailed. The proliferation of these kinds of stories among the Opening Day entries is revealing: in some organizations, you’re a hero among engineers if you come up with a whizzy new app (even if the implementation is a cesspool), while in others you might gain respect among engineers by getting a big performance win (even if it makes things a bit flakey), but in Solaris development, nothing gains the respect of peers like debugging some diabolical bug that has plagued the operating system for years. So if you’re new to OpenSolaris and you’re looking to make a name for yourself, a good place to start is in the never-ending search for elusive bugs. To get a flavor for the thrill of the hunt, check out:

• George Shepherd on using DTrace to debug a nasty STREAMS bug.

• Jim Carlson on debugging a hang in ldtermclose. You can infer how much we obsess about debugging from the first line of Jim’s entry: “Every once in a while, a bug sticks with you long enough that you remember the ID number without having to think about it.”

• Adam Leventhal on debugging a cross call hang.

• Chris Gerhard on a two line fix in init.

• Sarah Jelinek on debugging a UFS file truncation bug. For me personally, it’s always very gratifying to see a bug like Sarah’s – where DTrace was guided by expert hands to help out on a tough problem.

• Sherry Moore on debugging a bug at the murky interface between compiler and operating system.

• Saurabh Mishra on debugging a memory ordering problem.

• Alok Aggarwal on debugging an NFSv4 problem on SPARC.

• Narayana Kadoor on debugging a logic error in dynamic intimate shared memory (DISM).

• Surya Prakki on debugging kernel memory corruption, surely the most pernicious of software pathologies.

• Raja Gopal Andra on debugging an application bug.

• Martin Englund on tracking down a bug in the audit daemon.

• Peter Harvey on increasing UNIX group membership. In this entry, Peter doesn’t dwell on the bug – which is clear in this case – but rather the complexities of fixing it. It’s a good example of how something that appears simple can be stubbornly complicated.

• Prabahar Jeyaram on debugging a nasty panic in the UFS lockfs protocol.

And here are a few more on the simple (but thorough) satisfaction from fixing old bugs:

• Paul Roberts on an ancient bug in xargs.

• Stacey Marshall on a four year old bug in the name service switch. Stacey’s entry touches on the larger satisfaction of going from a bug in a strange subsystem to understanding the code, developing the right fix, verifying the fix and then writing the test case to be sure. The dedication to this kind of craftsmanship – taking the time to do it the Right Way, even for small stuff – is what has drawn many of us to Solaris; it is, as Stacey says, “what I love about this job.”

• Darren Moffat on a nine year old bug in usermod.

That about does it for today. There are still many more entries to categorize, but fortunately, I think I can see the light at the end of the tunnel – or is that just the approach of death from the exhaustion of sifting through all of this content?

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