On March 25 - 26, Sun China Engineering & Research Institute and
Peking University has co-hosted the
OpenSolaris Curricula Workshop in
Peking University.
The
topics of this workshop are how to integrate the
OpenSolaris Plugin materials into the Operating System curricula in
China universities. During the two-day workshop, totally 27 professors
from 19 universities has participated in the discussions. You could get
known of them in the all-hands photo. It's impressive is that 5
professors attended the workshop from Shanghai, Guangzhou, Xi'an and
ShanDong, which is far away from Beijing.
During the workshop, 10 professors presented on the kernel modules of
OpenSolaris w/ the Plugin materials which they prepared.
In the course
of each presentation, we have a heated discussion on the OS concepts,
mechanisms and how Solaris implements. Certainly we have collected a
bunch of questions on each kernel module. Also in the panel discussion,
we have come to commitments to integrate the OpenSolaris Plugin
materials in China Universities.
Some highlights:
o 11 universites has commited to use OpenSolaris Plugin at Spring
semester
o To cover all the Plugin materials, all commited universites
will teach the compulsory 11
chapters, and the optional chapters will be distributed into 8
universities for trial lecturing
o Some good suggestions on integrating OpenSolaris into University
Curricula, please see below
Prof. Chen of Peking University has hosted the Saturday morning's
session. At the keynotes speech, Jason Tong has delivered the speech on
Open Source, Open Standards and Education Innovation.
And Prof. Chen
has reported the overall OpenSolaris Plugin work with demonstrating how
to use the available Lecturing Plugin and Lab Plugin include MDB
instructions and DTrace courses toolkits.
In
the panel discussion, the
professors has proposed some pretty good ideas to integrate the
OpenSolaris Plugin into the current courseware: a). Distribute the
Plugin trial usage in a host of universities in three semester: Spring
of CY06, Fall of CY06 and Spring of FY07; b). Open the OS advanced
Course for postgraduate students to introduce Solaris/OpenSolaris only;
c). Open some optional courses on Solaris administration or application
development so that courses could broaden the audience in students; d).
Give students the curriculum pass diplomat signed by Sun; e). Build up
a Open Courseware website for OpenSolaris curricula; f). Start more
online discussion on
OpenTech.org.cn;
At the Saturday afternoon's session hosted by Prof. Xiang of Tsinghua
University, 4 professors have presented on Scheduling, Device Drivers
and Process fork/exec. In discussing about the Solaris scheduling,
professors argued about the pros and cons of 1:1 process model and LWP,
also they are not sure about the relationship between 6 scheduling
types. In the Device Driver discussion, we have realized that shortage
of the documents on Solaris Device Management like the specfs and
devfs, both in Solaris Internals and Writing Device Driver, but most
professors are willing to introduce the Solaris Device Management if
they could access some documents on it. One more interesting note is
that they think the Solaris Interals Overview chart is lacking of
description on cross-modules relationships, esp. the Resource
Management modules. In the discussion of fork/exec, they are not sure
about the semantic of vfork.
In the afternoon's panel discussion, we have come to unanimous decision
on distributing the trial lecturing the OpenSolaris Plugin. In the
meeting, professors from 11 universities has committed to use the
Plugin materials in Spring semester (More universities will be added
into the list after we have the OpenSolaris Curricula workshop at
Shanghai, Guangzhou, Xi'an, Chengdu and Dalian in April) . In the
spreadsheet of the Plugin materials, all universites commited to use
the OpenSolaris Plugin materials will teach the compulsory 11
chapters, and the optional chapters will be distributed into 8
universities for trial lecturing.
Prof. Zhao of Peking University has hosted the Sunday morning's
session. At the beginning, I have presented and demonstrated the ZFS.
And most professors are interested in the innovations of ZFS. During
the presentation, I answered bulks of questions page by page, like the
difference between Raid-Z and Raid 5, DMU and the Page management in VM
and the ZIL. After ZFS, I also demonstrated the BrandZ, they are
interested in trying it in the labs. During the discussion of kernel
services, some questions are on the interrupt handling of the clock
interrupt lock, lostticks.
In the afternoon's session hosted by Prof. Chen of Tsinghua University,
we have discussed about the Virtual Memory. The notable discussion is
that we have picked out the errors in the new version Solaris Internals
books in P31 of chpt_memoryarch.pdf: Swapfs_putpage has changed for
swap_putpage in the source code.
To sum up, as Prof. Liang from Shanghai JiaoTong University said, OpenSolaris will truly be popular in China universities if we could keep up the discussion for a period of time and IF Linux companies could provide such kind of communication platform before, Linux might have become far more prosperous in China, esp. in China universities. As you know, most
professors have thought of such
kinds of questions for about 4-5 years and even longer in the teaching experience, and
after the discussion, they have come to understanding better and
emphesizing the discussed points. As well, to continue the discussion,
the professors are suggesting that
they could discussion on the online discussion forum on the
OpenTech.org.cn.
