Immediately after Glenn's presentation on OpenSolaris project at the
May 17 morning's last keynotes of China ERC, he interviewed two famous
OS professors in China: Prof. Chen from Peking University and Prof.
Xiang from Tsinghua University.
The excerpt of the interview are as follows, which may address your
concerns why OpenSolaris could be widely adopted in China universities
--
Glenn：Just now I mentioned
Solaris adoption in China Universities. Now I would like to
invite two professors to share their thoughts, Professor Chen from
Peking University and Professor Xiang from Tsinghua University. They
did a great job in Solaris curricula development & adoption.
Let’s welcome them! (Applaud)
Glenn：Hello, Professor
Chen. Can you share with us why you are interested in Solaris and
decide to integrate Solaris in your OS teaching?
Prof. Chen:
The major reason that we are interested in Solaris and decide to
integrate it to the OS courses is that Solaris has advantages like:
1.Solaris has many features. e.g. Multi-threading model, tight coupled
between VM and VFS, etc. Solaris 10 has lots of new features deserved
student’s learning. Professors are willing to teach these to students.
2.Solaris is open source now. Moreover, Solaris has many tools and
documents to analyze kernel. Professors could kick-off the study
quickly, on the other hand, we could study in-depth.
3.Sun has strong support in OS teaching. Sun has provided lots of
informative and instructive materials for educators. In addition, the
cut point of Sun is great, we gathered a host of professors to develop
the OS curriculum materials, and held the OS curriculum workshops to
discuss about Solaris kernels based on the materials. The approach is
solid and very easy to enable the professors to adopt them in the OS
curriculum. So it’s popular by professors.
Glenn：Brilliant! How is
the curriculum going?
Prof. Chen:
1.After three months’ collaboration by over 10 professors, we
have finished the first version of Solaris OS curriculum materials at
this March. They include 16 chapters of slides and notes for the OS
curriculum in over 600 slides and many notes files. To coordinate with
the OS concept curriculum, we also developed the OS experience lab
courses with DTrace and MDB. They include over 40 DTrace scripts and 6
MDB labs. They are very practicable in OS courses.
2.During March to April, we have held 6 OpenSolaris OS curriculum
Workshops in 6 cities (Beijing, Shanghai, Xi’an, Guangzhou and Dalian).
Totally, there are over 120 professors participated in and the
responses are so great that many professors decided to integrate these
curriculum materials in the ongoing Spring semesters. And others
committed to use the curriculum materials in Fall semester of next
Spring semester.
Glenn：Thank you for sharing
your great ideas with us. Next, let’s turn to Professor
Xiang. I heard about that you’ve been interested in Solaris
teaching with source code since long time ago. Can you tell us
the story?
Prof. Xiang:
When doing my doctoral project on Computer Network, I was working on
Sun Solaris platform. Since then, I got familiar with and interested in
Solaris. At 2001, when Sun announced to open Solaris 8 source code, I
have requested to use Solaris source code to teach OS courses, but it
was pending for legal issues. Until last year, Sun announced to open
Solaris 10 source code, we have clear up the way of adopting Solaris in
OS curriculum. So far, we have been collaborating with Sun, esp. Sun
China ERI near to Tsinghua campus very happily.
Glenn：Professor Xiang, you are
leading the source code analysis project. How is the project
going? What are the influences the project might bring in the
future?
Prof. Xiang:
1.An open source OS to be widely accepted and adopted, source code
analysis is a key step. Also, it is the foundation of understand
Solaris features in-depth and participate the development of
OpenSolaris.
2.To analyze and study OpenSolaris source code is not helping the OS
courses, but also helping the research projects. In China’s Eleventh
Five-Year Plan, China government has explicitly proposed to strengthen
the construction of platform software. OpenSolaris brings a lot of
opportunities to innovate. We hope to start some innovative projects
based on OpenSolaris.
3.Solaris has lots of useful tools, say, DTrace, MDB, which provide a
good convenient approach to study the kernel modules. Besides, books
like Solaris Internals and tech support from Sun engineers help us very
much.
4.We are going well along with the project and we will deliver the
analysis and share with the community step by step.
Glenn: Lots of thanks to two
Professors for sharing their thoughts and their stories. Let’s
applaud them for their great contribution in spreading open
technologies, and esp. OpenSolaris!
