I Love Intel's Commitment to OpenSolaris

One of the things that excites me about using OpenSolaris is the amount of work that Intel is doing to improve the product for their processors. David Stewart, an engineering manager at Intel's Open Source Technology Center, has put together a series of 5 minute vidoes highlighting their work. All are entertaining, informative and worth a watch...

Episode 1: OpenSolaris & Intel Processors

Episode 1 provides a nice summary or Intel's various efforts, which includes power management, fault management (self-healing), performance and driver support:

The remaining episodes dive a bit deeper into each of the various projects, starting with power management...

Episode 2: Power Management

Good power management is critical to extending your battery life, and David uses the analogy of his teenage daughters (the operating system) aggressively driving his hybrid car (the processor). Unless you teach the driver (operation system) to drive the car (chip) efficiently, the efficiency benefits of the car/chip are somewhat worthless. In the video David also mentions a tool called PowerTOP, which I wrote about back in July:

Episode 3: Performance

Intel is constantly adding new processor instructions to its chips for common code sequences, but as a developer do you want to worry about instructions at that level? Thankfully you don't have to, as Intel is doing the work for you to the libraries in OpenSolaris:

Episodes 4-7: Fault Management (Predictive Self-Healing), Virtualization and I/O Acceleration

These 3 episodes are probably of more interest to system administrators than developers, but they're very interesting none-the-less:

Fault Management (Predictive Self-Healing)

Virtualization

I/O Acceleration

Episode 8: Dunnington

Finally, this video excited me because OpenSolaris excels in multi-core enviroments and Dunnington is Intel's 6 core chip that will be out later this year (giving a 4 way server 24 processors):