I am doing the yearly update of my blog Hopefully I will update it more frequently now. Actually I have a lot of things to blog about and I really need to take the time to do it.

So first I am changing the name of my blog from "The Bad Trap" to "The Hyper Trap" because I am not dealing with Solaris "Bad Trap" bugs anymore, instead I am now working with the hyper traps of the new SPARC processors. Concretely this means that I have moved from the Solaris Sustaining group to the Niagara/Rock Software Engineering group and I am now part of the Logical Domains development team.

Logical Domains (LDoms) is a brand new product which has been released few days ago. This is a virtualization solution for SPARC systems which allows to create up to 32 domains on a Sun Fire T1000 or T2000 server. Each domain can then run its own operating system. The virtualization is done using a thin hypervisor layer which is directly implemented in the firmware of the system and which uses some special features of the UltraSPARC-T1 processor (aka Niagara).

With this position and job change, I also moved from France to Menlo Park in California, and I just arrived in the US four weeks ago. These first weeks were very busy to settle in but now this is starting to be quieter so more time should be available to blog.

I am finally taking some time to start my blog. So let's start with a short introduction: my name is Alexandre Chartre, I am based in Grenoble (France) and I am working for the Solaris sustaining team. For short this means that I am engineer and that I am spending most of my time troubleshooting problems and fixing bugs!

The main product I work on is Sun Cluster. This software offers application service continuity by providing high-availability at the application level: that means that an application can run on several different machines and if a machine becomes unavailable then the application will be automatically switched over to another system with minimal service downtime (well, that's a quick one line summary).

My favorite topics are the Solaris kernel, debugging and troubleshooting. Sun Cluster is then a very interesting software to work on because a major part is implemented in the kernel and it interacts with many kernel components. So this makes my job very interesting and challenging.