Amiram Hayardeny's My China Experience

Techdays in Seoul, Korea

Techdays in Korea

The way I see it, Sun Techdays is all about “spreading the word”, trusting, that once the word is out – the users will follow. The understanding of the advantages and story behind it makes it easy to buy into it. After all, not everyday do you get an offer to use the best operating system on the planet – for free. Sun employees, who understand the strategy behind OpenSolaris, see perfectly why Sun is driving OpenSolaris. Others may present the inevitable question: Sun is a business, how do you, as a business, benefit from giving away your “Crown Jewel” fro free. Solaris, as other operating systems are, is an extremely complex, heavy on intellectual property and innovation, very large piece of software. It takes a lot of resources and efforts from Sun to develop, maintain, sustain, introduce new features, etc. Estimates suggest that the investment in Solaris is in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The answer is relatively simple. Sun has a large variety of hardware, software, training and services to sell to participants. Sun will benefit from participation, but so will you.

No wonder Sun staff is giving a lot of attention to Techdays, and OpenSolaris Days. After all, they all get a very unique opportunity to meet with the developers, with the potential users, and to deliver the message to them.

I have been watching the preparations for the event. People are trying on shirts, making sure that their laptop works well with the projector. They are adding a final touch on their presentations, and verifying with their colleagues that the message is loud and clear.

Let me add a few words about the venue. Seoul first. Seoul is a very large city, larger than Beijing. Over 22 million people live in Seoul and it suburbs of Bucheon, Goyang, Incheon, Seongnam, Suweon. More facts about Seoul you can be found at: http://www.worldroom.com/pages/wrnsl/fastfacts/sl_fastfacts.phtml
The hotel, Coex Intercontinental is absolutely gorgeous, and the convention center is around the corner from the hotel.

Well over 200(!) people showed up for OpenSolaris Day. Some had to stand in the back. Mike Hayden, the MC, introduced the agenda and gave some administrative announcements – most had to do with the giveaway computer (brand new Ultra 20) and books (Solaris Internals and Solaris Performance). Mike went ahead and introduced the first speaker – Stephen Lau – a 3 year veteran with Sun and a graduate of UCSD.

Steve introduced the concept of community. He later explained what contribution means. I thought it was important that people understood that contribution does not have to be in terms of source code. Questions, answers, bug reporting and bug fixing are only a few means of contribution. Steve explained how to build a distribution of Solaris (more at http:///opensolaris.org/os/downloads/on).

OpenSolaris is LIVE! As soon as Sun developers check in code, it becomes available for everyone to download and build. This is a very powerful concept.

Steve explained how it is possible to build the entire system (a process which could take hours depending on the platform), or build parts of it. Now listen to this: Steve showed a small demo in which he changed a line of code in no other than the vi editor. He opened a file, inserted a “printf” and a “wait”, and sure enough, after building and installing, the vi editor behaved as expected, printed “Hello Seoul” and waited for 10 seconds. All I could think about was that I was introduced to vi almost a quarter of a century ago, amazing. The thought that you can play with the editor woke up the hacker in me...Of course, you could dismiss this by saying that my age and tendency for nostalgia triggered the last observation. To that I'd say, even nostalgia ain't what it used to be...

Next speaker was Dan Price, Staff Engineer at Sun, Kernel group, team lead for the Zones team. Dan has a B.Sc. With honors, in Computer Science from Brown University. Dan introduced the concept of Zones, and the different ways to implement them. He started with the need. People want Zones in order to consolidate execution environments, workloads, tiers in a multi-tier application environments, and save space, power and basically – total cost of ownership (TCO). Zones are also used in development environments: rather than getting each developer a server, each developer gets a zone.

There are various types of virtualization. Hard partitions, mainly for large servers on one hand, and resource management type on the other hand. The hard partitions type can run multiple versions of the OS (or different operating systems altogether), while the Resource Manager type can only run one main operating system, although it can run others as “guests”. The definition of a Zone is an isolated execution environment inside the Solaris operating system instance. It provides privacy, failure isolation and it is lightweight and efficient.

The Global Zone can see all others. Using the “es” command in the global zone will show all processes running in all zones. Dtrace can be used in the global zone, zone activities can be distinguished by the zone labels.

There is a small team doing zones at Sun. The team is working on integrating Zones with ZFS, configuration of privileges, cloning of Zones, Zone migration. Branded zones are yet another interesting concept. Lx brand allows users to run Linux in the zone – booting Linux init on top of Solaris kernel can be used as a transition tool, or as a solution for migrating all applications but one that must be run on Linux. In fact, users can use Dtrace on Solaris which is running Linux as an application – that's powerful!

Dan also explained about Xen. A Xen layer runs on the hardware, other operating systems can run on top of Xen as guests – allowing users to virtually run several operating systems on the same hardware at the same time. A chart showing the activity of a web server was shown while its own migration was taking place using Xen. With the exception of about a half of a second interruption of service, there was no noticeable degradation of performance. Then why run this on Solaris? Simple: Solaris has strong features like FMA (Fault Management) which can predict hardware failure.
For more information on Zones:
http://opensolaris.org/os/community/zones
http://opensolaris.org/os/community/brandz
http://opensolaris.org/os/community/xen

There were a few other speakers and a surprise. I will continue tomorrow.

Posted at 10:00PM Nov 08, 2006 by Amiram Hayardeny in Personal  |  Comments[0]