Wednesday November 19, 2008 Holy Cr@po!a Batman, is that /bin/sudo I see in OpenSolaris nowadays???
Sometimes I get frustrated, just like many others, at how slow Sun is to change. One example is how Sun has dug their heels in towards sudo opposed to their implementation of roles based access. I mean this in regard to having root access to manage a system.
I'm ok with either one, but the majority of open source systems use sudo, and in the case of rbac/pfexec, it makes OpenSolaris different.
This type of change is monumental at Sun, IMO, and recently there has been more and more of it. It's not as if OpenSolaris has embraced sudo, RBAC is still in place and nothing has changed in that regard. But changes do seem inevitable, for everyone, and for better or worse it's good to see OpenSolaris changing/morphing into the systems that it will end up being.
I would venture to say that with IPS, zfs, and snapshots, OpenSolaris is standing up to be a great platform, the "New Solaris", and change is inevitable.
This new concept of managing our systems seems to be the nexus of it all...
Yeah, as any evolution, there's some rough edges...but things are getting smoother all the time and OpenSolaris has gotten a lot more comfortable for me to develop on.
It is time to let go of the past, and embrace the future. OpenSolaris has really started to turn into a commendable system, IMO.
Tuesday November 18, 2008 SVOSUG November Meeting will move to Tues., November 25th!
SVOSUG will move to Tues. next week due to Thanksgiving being on Thursday.
We will be offering to help folks install the most current OpenSolaris bits on their systems if you would like, on the metal or inside VirtualBox.
One most excellent feature that was just added to OpenSolaris is the ability to load/install with 512mb of memory. This not only holds true to install on laptops with less memory, but allows laptops with lower memory to host other environments within VirtualBox by only requireing 512mb of memory for the xVM.
I would also like to toss out some Lightning talks, and hope that others in the community will have some to add.
I have a couple lightning talks I will be giving, one on the new Fast Reboot added to build 100, and another on a couple tips to help your build performance.
If you have something your involved with on OpenSolaris, or something you've discovered, please feel free to give a short mention on it so that others might learn from it.
Bring a systems (to install), bring a talk, or just bring yourself, we'll meet in the Mansion on the Santa Clara campus next Tues., November 25th at 7:30pm.
Have you tried x86 Fast Reboot?
I was doing some non-scientific testing with the recent x86 Fast Reboot option which was added to reboot, thanks to Sherry Moore.
On one of my test systems I'm seeing about 32 seconds to reboot -f (1M) , opposed to 1 minute and 20 seconds for a typical reboot (1M). Systems are limited to being supported, since you need quiesce (9E) added to all drivers to allow the Fast Reboot.
If the only drivers without quiesce() support on the system are display and/or audio, you can set force_fastreboot=1 in /etc/system. If the NIC (wired or wireless) driver doesn't have quiesce(), you can unplumb the interface first then do fast reboot.
This is about 35% of a full reboot through BIOS on the machine I'm testing on. This is a system not running the desktop GUI, so mileage may vary.
This is very useful! The more we are able to work with systems to manage devices, we will have a more effecient system. Kudos to Sherry for this effort!
Wednesday November 05, 2008 James Gosling at SVLUG tonight!
James Gosling is doing a QA presentation at the Silicon Valley Linux User Group (SVLUG) tonight.
If your in the valley, with some time on your hands, drop over there.
Maybe I'll see you over there!