Thursday May 13, 2004
alanc @ sun.com
Alan Coopersmith’s blog
Random thoughts of a disorganized mind...
(and though it should be obvious, while Sun pays me to think about things, they disclaim any responsibility for these thoughts, nor do I claim what I say matches in any way what Sun thinks)
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Thursday May 13, 2004
That's a sunrise, not a sunset...
At least that's what I'm going to claim the photo at the top of my blog is, since I chose this new theme simply because I liked the photo and the look of the blog skin, not because of any symbolism. (Though I suppose I could try to claim something like before every sunrise there is a sunset, so it's just part of the cycle, like the ebbs and tides of the economic cycles, but thats putting way too much thought into it.)
After playing with the themes, I've now realized it's been a well over a week since my last blog post - though it almost seems longer since it was such a long week - mostly spent doing mind numbing paperwork, writing project specs and design documents for our architectural review committee, answering the endless stream of e-mail, and even doing a little coding. (I guess I've really crossed over from Programmer to Engineer since it seems I spend less than a quarter of my time actually working on code these days, and more than that each week in various meetings and conference calls.)
I did get a chance to dig into the SolarisIA X extension a bit and even did a quick port to the Xorg server that seems to work and which helped me better understand what the code does by forcing me to track down and understand all the different parts of the server it has to interact with. I don't know if we'll offer that back to the open source release, since it depends heavily on the SVR4 priocntl API's and the Solaris kernel scheduler support for the IA (interactive) process class. It would be interesting to see if on today's much faster machines, it still makes a big difference by boosting the priority of the process that currently has focus and compare against the original test results presented at the 1993 Usenix conference, but alas, that's time I don't have right now. The Sun Ray performance people do seem to believe it still makes a positive impact on Sun Ray servers where many users are sharing the CPU, so there's still at least some need for it today.
Posted at 12:26AM May 13, 2004 by Alan Coopersmith in General |
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