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.
BeleniX on a LiveUSB
Looking Glass 3D Live CD (BeleniX based)
Fault Management Architecture
Grid Engine
Virtualization technologies in OpenSolaris
The Java Team had demos on GlassFish, Portal Server, OpenJDK and a few other things.
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]