Still more blog sifting…

Even though the launch of
OpenSolaris was well over a week ago,
and even though the
Opening Day entries
have now been sifted through in
five different blog entries
(here,
here,
here
here and
here),
there are still
some great uncategorized entries. Without further ado…

• Zones. Zones are among the most talked-about
  new features in Solaris, and the engineers on the team have developed
  some highly-readable Opening Day entries describing the implementation.
  Start with
  David Comay’s
  entry taking you on a
  tour of zone state transitions, and then check out
  Dan Price’s
  entry to extend your tour to the
  innards of the zones console. Dan’s tour is notable because he takes
  you by an
  ASCII
  art comment of his that is one of the more elaborate in
  Solaris. (One of these days, I’ll take you on a tour
  of my favorite ASCII art comments in the source base — but today we have
  too much to see, so everyone back in the car!) Wrap up your tour of
  zones with
  John Beck’s entry
  describing adding command-line editing and history to zonecfg.This entry has applicability beyond zones — it’s a useful how-to for
  adding command-line editing and history to any C-based or C++-based application.

• Booting. The most exciting project to integrate into Solaris
  since Solaris 10
  shipped is surely the reachitecture of the booting system to use GRUB —
  and
  Shudong Zhou’s
  entry describing testing the code at Fry’s is a must-read.
  For more details,
  check out
  Jan Setje-Eilers’
  entry describing the new boot architecture.
  Look for more from these two — using GRUB allows for many new
  possibilities, and Shudong and Jan have much to blog about.

• Solaris Volume Manager.
  Despite the fact that it could save them gobs in licensing fees to
  certain third parties, many seem to not realize
  that we bundle an
  industrial-strength volume manager
  with Solaris. Hell-bent on describing what they’ve been working on for
  so long, the Solaris Volume Manager team was out in force on Opening Day.
  If you have any storage responsibilities in your shop and you’re not
  running SVM, you should carefully read these entries; SVM may well save
  you a bundle — making you such a hero that you’ll be able to tell the
  suits exactly what they can do with their
  TPS report.
  • Andre Molyneux on RAID 0+1 vs. RAID 1+0 and again on
    the role of timing in testing RAID 5 in SVM.

  • Jerry Jelinek on
    improving SVM response to disk failure.

  • Sanjay Nadkarni on
    resync regions and optimized resyncs — a feature which
    VxVM users will recognize as the SVM equivalent of dirty region logging (DRL).

  • Susan Kamm-Worrell on
    multi-owner disksets, an SVM feature that allows multiple nodes
    to simultaneously access volumes.

  • Steve Peng on
    disk Relocation in SVM.

  • Tony Nguyen
    on the SVM default interlace and resync buffer values.

• Miscellany. There are a handful of great entries that don’t fit neatly
  into any one category — or are so specific as to be their own
  category. Be sure not to miss these:
  • Jeff Bonwick on
    revealing the
    origins of the slab allocator.

  • Phil Harman
    on getting getenv to scale. Because so much Solaris
    scalability work happened many years ago, Phil’s is the only entry
    describing the specifics of getting a subsystem to scale with CPUs;
    Phil’s entry should be considered a must-read for anyone working on
    scalability.

  • Peter Memishian
    on
    using doors as a synchronization primitive. Peter’s work is
    a good example of why — contrary to the
    beliefs
    of some pinheads — developing a user-level service provider can be
    quite a bit more challenging than developing in the kernel.

  • Tim Marsland continuing
    his magnum opus on the implementation of Solaris 10 on x64 with
    Part 4: Userland.

  • Ienup Sung
    on efficiently handling illegal UTF-8 byte sequences.

  • Chandan describing
    the implementation of the OpenSolaris Source Browser

  • Cyndi Eastham
    on developing libavl.

  • Chris Beal
    describing the implementation of signal delivery.

  • Dave Miner
    leading a tour of the DHCP server.

  • Dave Powell on
    the
    implementation of pseudo-filesystems — and why /system is the new home for all such filesystems.

  • Jonathan Adams on
    macros and powers of two — and the simple pleasures of
    bit-twiddling.

  • Tom Erickson
    on the implementation of libdtrace. libdtrace is still a private
    interface (we still have some sanding and polishing to do), but Tom’s
    entry is a must-read
    for anyone considering writing their own DTrace consumer.

  • Keith M Wesolowski
    on getting SPARC inlines to work with GCC.

Phew! I think that about does it. When we first tried to encourage
Solaris engineers to blog on Opening Day, I thought we were going to have
a hard time convincing engineers to blog — I knew that providing in-depth,
technical
content takes a lot of time, and I knew that everyone had other priorities.
So when we were planning the launch and talking
about the possibility of dealing with a massive amount of Opening Day content,
my response was “hurt me
with that problem.” Well, as it turns out, most engineers didn’t need
much convincing — many provided rich, deep content — and I was
indeed hurt with that problem! While it was time consuming to sift
through them, hopefully
you’ve enjoyed reading these entries as much as I have. And let it be
said once more: welcome to OpenSolaris!

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