OSDevCon '08
Wednesday Jul 02, 2008
The OpenSolaris Developer Conference took place last week in Prage. I was over there attending the conference and giving a talk on OpenSolaris and NUMA architectures on Friday. Here's a quick report for those who couldn't be there.
Vineeth Pillai present a tutorial about Project Crossbow on Wednesday morning, which was very interesting and always a good thing to brush up on. I always get impressed at the flexibility Crossbow provides and how easy it is to configure a complicated network setup with a handful of commands. During the afternoon, Roman Shaposhnik presented a tutorial on OpenSolaris and developer tools. He went from Sun Studio 12 to p* tools, mdb, DTrace and dbx. Adriaan de Groot talked about his experiences porting KDE from gcc to Sun Studio 12, and how SS12 follows C standards so closely that in some cases it identified bugs that gcc hadn't picked up. I gotta find some time to play with KDE on OpenSolaris, looked very interesting.
On Thursday, Jim Grisanzio gave the keynote and talked about the OpenSolaris community and how it has evolved since it began. He brought up many points, I found very interesting his comments about how we at Sun are working towards opening our development processes and how things are moving forward with OpenSolaris 2008.05 and the upcoming move of ON to the external repo.
Jim Walker gave the OpenSolaris Testing presentation, which I did back in April during FISL 9. It's cool to see how your work compares to the person who not only wrote the presentation, but has given it a number of times. Wolfgand Ley talked about the OpenSolaris Cryptographic Framework, which I wasn't very familiar with, so this was one of my favorite talks during the conference. Max Bruning walked ZFS data structures and showed us how to go from uberblock_t to the actual data on disk. It's a tough presentation to give, but it's always cool to walk structs and pointers with mdb and zdb.
Friday started with Dave Stewart's keynote on Intel and OpenSolaris, covering all the points where Intel is participating in the community. He also showed how Intel is committed to open source in general. Chad Mynhier presented his work with stddev() and brendan() in DTrace, very enlightening to see how simple it is to incorporate actions in DTrace and how well designed and implemented it is. I went on and talked about MPO, lgroups, how the kernel optimizes performance on NUMA machines, liblgrp(3LIB) and discussed some of the challenges ahead for NUMA. The conference wrapped up with Michal Pryc talking about Presto, the new system for printing in OpenSolaris.
Overall it was a good conference, both from the technical and social point of view. Nice to meet some of the people I've been in contact with over email for quite some time, and meet new ones. It's good to see how things are evolving in OpenSolaris. The project had a rough last ~10 months and it's reassuring to see how we're making progress.
Thanks to the GUUG and the CZOSUG for organizing it, and congrats on the success. Hope to be there for next year's. Slides and videos here.
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