CrossBow - Customer Oriented Project Development
Awhile ago my team and myself went a roadshow to a number of customers (60+) around the world to showcase "FireEngine" project (e.g. Enhanced TCP/IP stack) and Solaris 10 in general. We also took the opportunity to show case some of the projects we had planned (e.g. "Nemo" Network Interface Driver Framework, "Yosemite" UDP Performance Project), etc. with all of being very well received. However not wanting to rest on our laurels we proactively sought to understand their networking needs including the issues that keep them up at night, ways to enhance how they do business, and most importantly how could Solaris be a differentiator for them.
The distilled version of their collective requirements were fairly simple -- fairness, priority and resource control:
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Fairness: Ability to allow various traffic types to share the bandwidth and associated compute resources in a fair manner
Priority: Ability to prioritize service, protocols or containers
Resource control: Ability to manage network bandwidth and associated compute resources for each service, protocol, or container
However figuring out how to deliver such capabilities in the networking side of the operating system was not that simple but that is why we like to get up and go to work every morning.
To address the needs of those customers we came up with the CrossBow project but once again we didn't rest on our laurels. We revisited many of the same customers (and more) to preview the CrossBow project and make sure it was appropriately vetted which it was. However we wanted to go even further than the vetting effort, oven normal Alpha and Beta programs, we wanted to take make it an open development effort.
Now is your chance to participate. Take a look at the OpenSolaris CrossBow project page at:
Subscribe to the CrossBow discussion alias:
And take a look at Sunay's blog:
