Through the Looking Glass Adventures in Solaris Userland

Goodbye !

Today happens to be my last day at Sun. It has been a great Journey in the short period I have been here. I leave with nothing but the happiest memories of Sun and its amazing Engineering Culture ! Thank you Sun, for being so special to me :-)

P.S: My personal blog will go on at http://thermalnoise.wordpress.com/

Posted at 07:17PM Jun 27, 2008 by Ananth Shrinivas in Personal  |  Comments[0]

Sun Technical Summit, Bangalore

Sun Technical Summit 2007 was held in Bangalore on Friday. It was a half-day technical event where some of the following technologies were showcased:

The event was graced by the inimitable Scott McNealy, Chairman, Sun Microsystems. Scott gave the keynote address. He touched upon the resurgence of Multi-Threaded computing and Sun's CMT processors, The Java FX script and Java FX mobile platfrorms, Netbeans, Enterprise Java Stack and Solaris. Scott looked visibly tired in the midst of a whirlwind world tour. But that did not dampen his usual sense of humor one bit. He was upto to his jokes ranging from the impact of Dell Boxes on Global Warming to renaming Sun to take advantage of the Java branding !

Meanwhile Sanjeev and Me were geared up for our respective presentations on ZFS and OpenSolaris. The folks who attended the OpenSolaris talk were the ones who were really interested because it was the last talk of the afternoon, the previous talks had delayed the sessions considerably and they were in danger of missing their lunch :-) Still, more than a hundred developers were huddled in a overflowing hall.

Some of our engineers had recently got new Sony Vaio laptops with NVidia cards. So we had Compiz running on the latest Nevada bits. This was dramatically helpful in showing how much more usable Solaris has become on the Desktop front. Having given numerous presentations to similar audiences before this, one thing that I can positively assert is that - Developers (except for the hardcore geeks like Sun Engineers), are big-time suckers for Desktop Features, Multimedia Apps and Graphical Effects. Compiz 'WOW'ed a hundred times more people than DTrace or ZFS did. Its very difficult in a span of 30 minutes to convince ordinary developers that Solaris kicks butt using DTrace or ZFS. But Compiz just gave us that opening. After that, anything told about ZFS and Dtrace was readily accepted as magic ! I had at least twenty people walk upto me and say something to the effect of "Wow ! This is mind-blowing stuff. How can I run this on my PC ?"

Most of us folks at Solaris Revenue Product Engineering, India have our desktop so configured that people walking up to our desks generally refuse to believe that we are using Solaris :-). This is one of the reasons why BeleniX (which originated from Moinak Ghosh of our team) is probably the most "friendly" OpenSolaris distro out there. Now if only we can have an Official Sun-Distribution of OpenSolaris that can deliver such an out-of-the-box experience, we would be reaching out to a whole new set of people - Not our regular boring sysadmins who manage massive data centers and insist that '/bin/sh' is god's own shell. Is 'Project Indiana' the answer ? Scott at least dropped hints that it might be so !

Posted at 09:15AM May 20, 2007 by Ananth Shrinivas in Sun  |  Comments[0]

Sun Tech Days, Pune

UPDATE: Entry from my partner in crime Pradhap who did the same session in Mumbai - http://blogs.sun.com/pradhap/

Sun Tech Days - India (21 - 23 Feb 2007), was held in four cities simultaneously this year. Hyderabad was the main location where nearly 7000 people attended the event over the course of 3 days. Delhi, Mumbai and Pune were the other three cities where a "mini-version" took place on the first day alone. This was a watershed event  - The SINGLE LARGEST technical event in Indian History  - 10000 people attending in all 4 cities !!!

I was missing the fun at Hyderabad by volunteering to go to Pune :-) Pune is one of the most tech-friendly places in India. Probably next in line after Bangalore and Chennai. But the DNA of the average Developer in Pune is very different from that of any other Indian City.

In Bangalore for example (home to the Largest OpenSolaris User Group in the World), it is almost impossible to find anyone between ages 17 and 30 who does not know Java ;-) Though we have a sizable opensolaris community (2 of whose members were speakers at Hyderabad !) here, we think it is possible to double, triple, or even x10 it ! That is despite the fact that there are not many professionals who work on Solaris as a part of their day job.

Now contrast that with Pune, where in a hall of 700-800 people, 1/3rd - 1/4th of the arms shot up when I casually asked for people who work on Solaris for their day jobs ! Thanks to the variety of Systems Software and Unix based companies in Pune. My Initial plan for the talk was 45 minutes of Solaris 10 features. What actually happened was 1.5 hours of DTrace and ZFS. The moment I explained DTrace, the crowd went wild - there were all sorts of questions.

And when we went to ZFS, the geeks were literally eating out of my hand ;-). There were questions on *how* can ZFS do that array of mind-boggling things automagically. A little explanation on the design principles, the COW methodology and the ZFS test suite put all doubts to rest. Free Your Mind !

An old gentleman, Managing Director of a company who provide some solution on DOS (yep its not a typo) was insistent that we port ZFS to MS-DOG or atleast write a DOS emulator for Solaris. I think dosexec might help him or with FreeDOS looking stable and Xen coming into OpenSolaris, even THAT insane thing might become possible ! There were no holds barred for questions even after the talk was over. The crowd was very passionate and the session was productive to say the least !

If Bangalore can carry a great deal of momentum for OpenSolaris, Pune looks like a great bet where you can expect the "next big thing" from OpenSolaris in India to show up. But that needs some fostering to begin with. Is anyone from POSUG willing to take up the baton and wake up the sleeping giant ?

Posted at 08:03PM Feb 24, 2007 by Ananth Shrinivas in Sun  |  Comments[1]

FOSS.IN - Day 3

The final day of FOSS.IN was quite memorable. The demos and BOFs were scheduled as usual along with one talk by an OpenSolaris community member.

The crowd began coming in late on a lazy Sunday morning. By Mid Afternoon the ZFS demo should have been sold to a hundred people ! Seeing the interest in ZFS we decided to have a BOF. About 10 people turned up for the BOF and It proved to be very  interesting. Sanjeev and Nagki, our local ZFS gurus went deep into the depths of ZFS explaining design principles and the complex algorithms of ZFS. The crowd proved equal to the task and fired back questions left and right. By the time the BOF was over, a few people were in a total state of shock. They could not quite believe that all this is Open Source !! "So, when it is going to come to my Mac ?" was the question that we got at the end of it !

After that I attended a BOF on promoting FOSS in the Student community in India. Both students and prominent members of the FOSS community attended it. While the students complained of the lack of support, resources and interest in FOSS. The FOSS members shot down most arguments with "You know what I did when I was in College ?". It took a few sensible folks from the Linux and OpenSolaris community to turn the discussion to a more meaningful one. In this process I also came to understand that HP and IBM are as much active in educational institutions as Sun is and debatably more so. Most of the Students were very bullish on HP and IBM because, even if they don't contribute as much code as Sun to the FOSS community, they offered a *lot* of Jobs to students involved with FOSS.

The best and most surprising part of the day was when Anil Gulecha, a community member who had modified BeleniX to boot from a USB Pen Drive gave a talk on how he did it. It had an overflowing full house and was a resounding success ! 

Later in the evening we wound up early and said farewell to FOSS.IN/2006. It was a very instructive experience overall - Getting to know the local FOSS community better, viewing the world through the eyes of customers and developers, evangelizing vastly superior technologies like DTrace and ZFS and connecting to other people in general.

I can bet we would be there @ FOSS.IN/2007 with an even more stronger presence thanks to all the lessons we learnt this year !

Posted at 08:10PM Nov 27, 2006 by Ananth Shrinivas in Sun  |  Comments[4]

FOSS.IN - Day 2

FOSS.IN moved on to its second day today. Contrary to our expectations, we had a lesser crowd today than yesterday. But that didn't dampen our spirits especially as it was the "Sun" Day. We had one full day of Sun Talks - OpenSolaris & Java. Java arguably hogged more limelight today at the talks. But that only meant we tried harder to make the "OpenSolaris Impact" that we never fail to make at such events !

Although I could not attend it, the DTrace Performance Tuning talk by Peter Karlsson was supposedly well recevied - especially the demos. Later in the Day I teamed up with Kishore to deliver the BrandZ presentation. Kishore did the difficult job of explaining the concepts and left me with the fun part of doing the demo. As I was manning the BrandZ/Zones stall too, we noticed that despite its brilliance, BrandZ didn't find much buyers amongst the FOSS crowd who already have Linux running on their machines and didn't appreciate *why* BrandZ on OpenSolaris would benefit them. After some brain bashing, I came up with the following demo which could (hopefully) sell BrandZ to the GNU/Linux crowd.

The saviour (as always) was DTrace. We took the “One Universal Application” - emacs, and did some basic Dtracing. We found that Emacs tries to open the ~/.emacs configuration file once. *Even* if this call fails, it proceeds to do *twenty* stat64() on *each of* .emacs, .emacs.el, emacs.el.gz, .emacs.elc, .emacs.elc.gz – That is 100 useless stat64() calls on a non existent file. Just imagine this when your home directory is mounted over NFS! We then found the call stacks calling the redundant stat functions. Alas, they don't ship Linux with the useful CTF/Symbol Table Data that Solaris does. But then we temproarily worked around the "problem" by touching ~/.emacs. DTrace then showed that the one hundred stat64() calls were reduced to 3.

Wow ! 3 Minutes and 4 D-Scripts later, we had found that the most popular Free/Open Source Software in the world wasn't written that smartly. Just imagine the layers and layers of linux code written by less able programmers and those seen by lesser eyes. There is a lot of scope for profiling and understanding your application behaviour and using it to drive performance gains - And DTrace is unarguably the best tool in the world to do that. That seemed to convince people as to why they should consider BrandZ !

We met a few community people who had actually used DTrace or were in the process of learning it. And the one common impression that we keep getting from such people is that they believe DTrace is a Magic Wand. You just run it on your binaries and it tells you what are the bottlenecks and how you solve them. We had to dispel that myth without making them lose faith that DTrace can actually be used by "Non-God" people. Brendan's DTraceToolkit was something we found useful in such an argument.

All in all a very satisfying (and tiring) day. The only disappointing part was that we didn't receive any submissions for the OpenSolaris Quiz we came up with. Hopefully we can get a few answers tomorrow !

Stay Tuned for Day 3 ...

FOSS.IN/2006 BLOGGERS 

http://blogs.sun.com/moinakg

http://blogs.sun.com/madhu

http://blogs.sun.com/popuri

http://blogs.sun.com/josephgeorge

http://blogs.sun.com/ganesh

Posted at 01:33AM Nov 25, 2006 by Ananth Shrinivas in Sun  |  Comments[1]

FOSS.IN - Day 1

FOSS.IN

FOSS.IN is the "Free and opensource software" conference that happens every year in India. It has grown from a small event attended by a bunch of Linux hackers to a huge event that is one of the most important landmarks in the open source calendar each year. The Speakers in the past years have included famous names such as Richard Stallman, Alan Cox and Daneese Cooper. This year Ramsus Lerdof is here to speak about PHP5 !

Sun first took part in this event last year. At that time the event was almost completely managed by our Team [Solaris Sustaining a.k.a. Solaris Revenue Product Engineering a.k.a. SSaE a.k.a OPN1/RPE ] led from the front by our managers Sumitha and Joe. This year, thanks to the open sourcing of Java, a lot of teams from the India Engineering Center took part in planning and conducting the event. Today was the opening day and the Sun stall had virtually no competition from anyone else in terms of attention, crowd and enthusiasm. Of course, we were the Platinum Sponsors for the Event !

Demos

We had the following Demos Lined Up. All the demos were well received in general.

The LG3D demo attracted both the Geek and Non-Geek population and Soon people wanted to know how to get this thing running on their Desktops !

The ZFS demo just took everybody's breath away. People who thought they knew what filesystems were all about were forced to rethink.

The BrandZ demo showing a CentOS desktop inside OpenSolaris was well received. And since a lot of people out there work with Linux Internals, they kept asking about the BrandZ Internals.

DTrace BOF

Apart from that we had 2 highly successful sessions BOF sessions on DTrace. We had about 10-15 people attend the BOF sessions. Some of them were our friends from HP :-). At the beginning of the BOF, they were highly skeptical of DTrace and were of the opinion that it was some marketing gimmick. But when we got our hands dirty and showed the amazing variety of things you can do with DTrace, the participants became more and more involved.

There were people who knew SystemTap and kprobes implementation details there, so we had to do some serious convincing to make them understand how DTrace works, why it is production stable, non-intrusive and flexible. At one point of time, we had to enable a probe and use MDB to show that how the first instruction was replaced with INT 0x03. And then find the “brktrap” handler from IDT0, ::dis it and explain how the dtrace_probe function is called.

The other challenge came when a Sysadmin from Yahoo (who manages 5000 boxes !) wanted us to convince him that people outside Sun can actually use DTrace to solve performance issues. Just having our standalone Ferrari 3400s with nothing particularly to run DTrace on and convince him, we were caught off guard. But thanks to the resourcefullness of Pavan, we showed him how a person who has no special knowledge of how the Broadcom Gigabit Ethernet (bge) driver works, can actually do some useful analysis on it.

At the end of the BOF everyone were extremely impressed with the Crown Jewel of Solaris and even our friends from HP, courteously said “It is good stuff mate. Very Good stuff !”.

That, I consider to be the Highlight of Day – 1 @ FOSS.IN. Stay Tuned for Days 2 & 3 .....

Visit the FOSS.IN wesbite @ http://foss.in/

Posted at 08:38PM Nov 24, 2006 by Ananth Shrinivas in Sun  |  Comments[0]

Hello World

This day seems to be as good as any other to start a weblog. More so as I complete my first year at Sun today. I am an Engineer in the New Solaris group. Specifically, Solaris Revenue Product Engineering. Even more specifically, the Approachability and Interoperability team in Bangalore, India. I work on libraries, commands/utilities, shells, packaging and patching, zones, smf, FTP server, Diskless clients and a few other things. I am also a passionate OpenSolaris enthusiast and I have a sneaking suspicion that I spend more time speaking about OpenSolaris than working in it. Hopefully, I can learn to write something useful here over time. Hello World !

Posted at 07:39PM Nov 22, 2006 by Ananth Shrinivas in Sun  |