My name is Eric Saxe.

I've been with Sun for 5 years, the last 3.5 of which i've been doing development on the Solaris Kernel. Most of my development efforts are dedicated towards streamlining the kernel's scheduling and dispatching policies. Scheduling policy dictates when threads run (priorities), and dispatching deals with the "where" (on which CPUs) part.

This has become especially interesting work over the last few years as various non-uniformities have crept their way into the system's memory and processor architectures. Non-uniformity in the memory side of things has blessed us with NUMA, and has more recently emerged on the processor side though Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT), Chip Multi-Processor (CMP), and threaded multi-core processor architectures.

I'm looking forward to talking more about how these non-uniformites can impact application and system performance, as well as how the Solaris kernel adapts in a future post.

But for now, welcome!