Liane Praza's Weblog

Wednesday June 15, 2005

OpenSolaris blogs: networking, drivers, security, and standards

Looking through the huge number of blogs written yesterday about deep technical topics in the OpenSolaris source code, I'm again flattened by the depth of expertise that's represented in these entries. There's a lot to navigate, and Bryan and I will be trying to give some lists by subject area. I hope others will start their own as they find content that's useful to them. Even if you don't have a blog, del.icio.us allows you to create tagged lists of bookmarks.

Security:

• Krishna gives some examples of using the crypto API.
• Jan gives some useful mdb dcmds for the crypto framework.
• Joep's got a whole range of security topics.
• Glenn gives a series (parts 1 and 2) with some examples of using least privileges.
• Darren talks about when you'll see more crypto code in OpenSolaris.
• Answers to the common question about increasing group membership from Peter.
• Audit daemon internals from Martin.
• Casper talks about ucred.
• Dan is the IPsec guru.
• Everyone can use a new lint option to find potential security problems in their code, as described by Scott.

Devices and Drivers:

• Artem talks about 1394 (Firewire) and SCSI.
• Sophia gives some details about Solaris' AGPgart.
• Drivers are mentioned peripherally, but it's just a great entry so I won't leave out Jim's description of 4028137.
• ATA and SATA from Mary.
• Haik handles cfgadm, which isn't a driver per se, but is close enough to fit here.
• Jerry handles failing faster for SVM (sounds strange, but is incredibly useful -- stopping retries early when hardware is truly dead decreases recovery times).
• Dan talks about the Zones console and console driver.
• SVM and RAID 0+1 and RAID 1+0.
• New boot, described by Jan changes device interaction with system startup.
• Mark gets pretty deep into DMA.
• Dilpreet covers hardening a leaf device driver
• ACPI is getting plenty of coverage on David's blog.
• Fritz gives an overview of the USB architecture.
• Alok mentions SVM diskset import, an its-about-time feature that appeared in Solaris 10.
• The devid cache in Solaris 10 is covered by Jerry.

By the way, I threw in the towel early on collecting SVM entries for this section. There's a bunch of really great content that will deserve its own list at some point!

Networking:

• Dave discusses the DHCP server.
• Kacheong talks about the underlying implementation behind an ndd tunable, as well as TCP window update.
• George Shepherd combines dtrace and streams.
• Socket options from Michael.
• Sebastien describes MTU discovery.
• IP over InfiniBand plumbing from Nitin.
• Yuzo gives examples of networking drivers which use each of the interfaces OpenSolaris offers.
• Jerry talks about diagnosing network performance problems using the OpenSolaris code.

Standards:

• Lee gets into the gory details of headers and standards.
• Glenn introduces some of his standards conformance work.
• Carol covers implementation of standards conforming commands

And, by the way, most of the entries above just wouldn't have been possible without the help of Chandan's incredible source browser for OpenSolaris.

If you're interested in seeing all the archived blog links, check out our opensolaris.org blogs page. I've tried to be really inclusive here and pick up entries that will suit many experience levels. The unifying factor is that every entry is by an expert in the area. If you have an entry I've missed in one of the topic areas, leave it on the comments for everyone to see.

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