rv's techblog: some kind of blog

Last weekend I had the pleasure of attending the 2nd Ontario Linux Fest, in Toronto, Canada. Brian Leonard had a talk accepted there but couldn't make it, so I offered to fill in for him. The event started on Friday night with a reception for anyone who had already made it to the area, I was somewhat jet lagged from the trip but made it and had the opportunity to talk to some of the folks attending it. The event took off on Saturday morning, four/five presentations/hour from 9am to 6pm (check out the schedule). The topics were well balanced from technical to legal and ideological aspects of FOSS.

The talk I presented was entitled "What Makes OpenSolaris Interesting", very demo oriented which was perfect for the clearly technically oriented audience. I gave an introduction to OpenSolaris, demoing all the desktop goodies that it currently has (snv99), followed by slides and demos of IPS, DTrace, ZFS, SMF, FMA and a quick slide about resource management (processors sets, zones, containers, branded zones). I chose to do a single slide followed by demo for each of these technologies.

IMO it went pretty well, even though I hit a few bumps throughout the talk. I think there were 15-20 people in the audience, a little over 10% of the Fest's attendance. Had some good questions and folks seemed interested. I took my laptop to the party at night and continued to demo OpenSolaris around.

Before I get into what I perceived to be people's opinion about OpenSolaris (which was generally good), let me repeat what I said throughout the weekend: it was a pleasure and a privilege to be invited to a Linux event. Regardless of the fact that we're talking about competing OSes, we're all interested in providing the best solutions to the market. I truly appreciate the opportunity to go there and show some of the features of the system I believe offers the best ones.

The overall reaction was good, everyone I talked to seemed interested in what OS has to offer. Hopefully, my presentation and the demos were enough to get some of them to try OpenSolaris.

During the Intellectual Property and Open Source talk, the speaker said that you can still write closed source modules/drivers with CDDL. Me being anything but an expert in licenses and in a Linux conference, I didn't object, but that didn't sound right. Please feel free to comment on this point, I'd like to learn more about it.

While talking to a Linux community leader from the US, she told me about trying OpenSolaris when it first came out but since it wasn't clear to her at that time whether it was really open source or not, she did not continue to use it. But she was positively impressed about the current state of the system - she was surprised when I told her that the screen she was looking at was an OpenSolaris session.

I heard some complaints from people who tried 2008.05 but the LiveCD failed to boot, or the system became unresponsive at some point. Lack of drivers, specially for network devices, was another one. But I assured that person that a lot has been accomplished in that respect, and even more should follow.

Jeremy Allison, who works on Samba at Google, said he thinks Linux might go to GPLv3 if ZFS goes too. He seemed interested in that, as he believes v3 is the way to go.

John 'maddog' Hall gave the closing keynote and talked about sustainable computing. He brought up some good points, but I was particularly pleased to hear him mention improvements that the Linux kernel needs to become more power efficient. He listed changes to the dispatcher, which is one of the projects that the Power Management Community has been working on for some time, and should deliver the changes to ON very soon. There is a patch for the Linux kernel that addresses that, but that's all I know about it. Again, comments are welcome.

Summing up, I think we'll see some growth of OpenSolaris users in Canada - note that I'm not quantifying the growth. It was great to be a part of a grass roots effort such as the Ontario Linux Fest. Gotta admire what a dedicated community is capable of. Congrats to the organizers and the volunteers, it was a great event.

Last week, the Porto Alegre OSUG proposed and voted a set of ground rules for the group. The need for these rules appeared early on, when the group was still struggling with what to do about meetings, membership and leadership, and became a recurrent topic in meetings. So after last month's meeting an initial set of rules was proposed, modified over the following week and voted and accepted earlier this week.

We posted the rules in our website, but since this might be of interest to other groups around the community, here's the translated version (the translation is a bit rough around the edges, but should be enough to get the point(s) across).

PoaOSUG's ground rules

This set of rules was voted and is valid as of July 31st 2008.

1. Constitution and rules

(a) the Porto Alegre OpenSolaris User Group has as main objective to promote OpenSolaris technologies through events and activities in the southern region of Brazil and similar events at the national and international levels;

(b) the group is affiliated to the OpenSolaris.org community and as such, respects its rules;

(c) this set of rules aims at organizing the different aspects of the group's activities with the intent to promote and encourage its member's commitment to the group and its events;

(d) any decision made by the group must follow the rules described in section 4, including modifications to this set of rules.

2. Meetings

(a) the group holds meetings at every last Thursday of each month. In case of a holiday, the group will decide whether the meeting should take place a week before or after during the previous month's meeting;

(b) each meeting has 70 minutes in duration at the most, being the first 25 minutes for general topics and the remaining 45 for one or more presentations;

(c) the group maintains a calendar of the upcoming meetings, as well as the material used during the previous meetings, available through its website;

(d) in case a member who has a presentation scheduled learns that he/she won't be able to attend the meeting, he/she must notify the group with at least two weeks before the event with a justification. The presentation will be rescheduled to the end of the queue in case the member does not comply with this rule;

(e) any member of the group can propose a talk/presentation on any OpenSolaris related subject of at least 15 minutes;

(f) in case there are no scheduled presentation(s) for a given meeting, the group's leaders are responsible for creating presenting a talk, inviting next month's speaker or to cancel the meeting. Meetings must always have a presentation or talk;

(g) the decision to call a meeting off is entirely up to the leaders, and must be taken with at least a week's notice.

3. Leadership

(a) the group's leaders are elected by the mechanism described in section 4. Any member can propose his/hers nomination as a leader through an email to the alias with the proposal and its justification;

(b) a leader can cease being a leader in case a member of the group propose that leader's loss of leadership through an email to the alias, or in case the leader him/herself decides not to continue to be a leader;

(c) the leaders are responsible for the meetings/events calendar and the organization of such, as well as the distribution of giveaways and creating flyers, posters and others;

(d) it's up to the leaders to set aside a few t-shirts and giveaway items to award the participation of members and encourage them to be more active in the community, etc.

4. Voting

(a) for the approval of a proposal, it must receive two favorable votes (not counting the member who proposed it) e none against (not counting the leader in case it's a proposal to remove him/her);

(b) a proposal must be approved or rejected in exactly seven days after the first proposal;

(c) a rejected proposal can only be re-proposed seven days after its rejection. In Case of a new rejection, the same proposal cannot be re-evaluated before a month;

(d) proposals must be submitted to the alias with the tag '[proposal]' at the beggining of the 'subject' field. Proposals will not be valid if they are not properly identified. This rule tries to guarantee that every member can easily identify the need for a vote;

(e) to elect or remove a leader, two votes in favor and no vote against are necessary (excluding the leader in question in the case of a proposition for removal). Any member can nominate another member for group leadership, as well as a self nomination. In the case of a nomination by a third member, the nominee must accept his/hers nomination prior to a vote.

So this year's FISL program appeared to be centered around community, web and scripting languages. On the first day I saw Josh Berkus' talk on database security. Which was very good, he's a great speaker and the subject is always an interesting one.

I had a presentation on OpenSolaris Testing on the second day, filling in for Jim Walker who couldn't make it to the event. I translated Jim's slide deck to BR-Pt and added a couple of pages introducing OpenSolaris, as I felt a good part of the audience would be new to the project.

The talk went smoothly, I started by asking how many people knew about OpenSolaris and got mixed responses. So I went on to talk about the basics of the project and the features that set it a part from other OS'es, the structure of the community and opensolaris.org, and the distributions (thanks to Thirtankar Das for the distro slide).

I talked about the Testing Community, TET, STF, the source browser and got to the demo part. Fortunately, the network connection came up just when I started to show the Self-Service Testing project and, a few slides later, the Test-Farm. People seemed interested in the infra-structure and how simple it is to submit a test run. Got a few questions about the automation software and the findleaks test afterwards.

Josh Berkus' 'Safe Data is Happy Data'

myself on OpenSolaris Testing

Theodore Ts'o's EXT4 Talk

Later on the same day I attended Theodore Ts'o's talk on the Linux kernel. It turned out to be a very informal Q&A, giving an opportunity to get his opinion on OpenSolaris. I didn't want to turn the thing into OpenSolaris at all, so I waited half way through the questions and asked him his opinion on the OpenSolaris Project and technologies like DTrace and ZFS. He gave a neutral and somewhat political answer with interesting considerations. Yesterday I found out that he recently expressed some critics about the project on his blog, which was in part responsible for a very interesting conversation on the OpenSolaris Advocacy alias over the last couple of days.

On the last day I attended another talk by Ts'o on the EXT4 file system, which IIRC will emerge early next year. I'm far from an EXT# expert, but I had the impression that it is mainly a follow up to EXT3 that extends bit depth ona few key fields. None of the new features drew my attention - maybe lazy write backs, but that's not really new, is it (honest question) ?

Over all I wish there were more kernel and performance related talks, so I'll definitely submit a couple of presentations for next year's. I'm pretty sure there are a good amount of people interested in OS' kernels in that part of the world.

FISL is always a great experience, if not for the varied program of talks and speakers, then for the incredible community environment. In three days the organization gathered over 7k people to talk, discuss and learn about open source, free software and a huge array of technologies.

Following what PoA-OSUG did last year, the group was out there spreading the word about OpenSolaris to something like 4-500 people over the three days. I had different commitments during the event, so unfortunately I couldn't stay with the group for the whole thing. But I did manage to lose my voice by the end of the first day, alternating between Sun's and the group's booth :)

I eventually chose to stay with the OSUG rather than at Sun's booth because I noticed that a lot of people, usually students, were a bit shy to approach some of us. While the UG folks were constantly flooded with people asking all sorts of questions and had a more open environment.

While over there I talked to students, professors, sysadmins, developers and business folks. We demo'ed DTrace, ZFS, MDB and other basic features and functionalities of the systems. I saw around 10 laptops installing SXDE and helped with some installer and driver issues. One professor from a local private college brought over CS students to do research on Operating Systems, so we ended up beeing interviewed by 4-5 different groups. IT professionals from areas like database, web infra-structure, Java, even a couple of guys from the air force showed up.

What was also very interesting to see were new local companies with products and services based around OSS, more than I recall seeing at last year's. From the BR government (in all of its instances) to the new guys starting their business, OSS has become a big part of the society. Not only generating revenue but being used to drive social changes. Inclusion, freedom of information, education, and source of revenue were all there.

FISL 9

PoA-OSUG

Sun

OLPC

On the last day I went over to the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) booth and borrowed one to try to install OpenSolaris 2008.05. Didn't get much luck as it can only boot from EXT2 or JFFS file images. The fact that we could barely get online also didn't help (since the air was saturated for most of the event), but it was worth a shot.

Looking forward to next year's. And if you need yet another reason to be there, the next one will be its 10th edition ;)

Last week I flew over to Porto Alegre for FISL 9 and the OpenSolaris Day promoted by the PoA-OSUG, as a pre-FISL event on April 16th for the local community as well as folks who were in town for the Forum.

I was very impressed with both the organization of the OSDay and the turn out. I don't have the exact numbers but I estimate around 80 people in total attended five talks from one to six pm. The group also organized a webcast throughout the event, with a pretty good number of accesses from what I was told.

The event started with Vitorio Sassi giving an introduction to OpenSolaris, followed by Silveira Neto talking about HPC and OpenSolaris and Ricard Severo on Project Crossbow. I went on and talked about the kernel, specifically the VM and scheduling subsystems (slides here). I had to leave the event after that, but the event continued with Thirtankar Das doing a talk on Project Indiana.

Vitorio Sassi

the crowd

myself

Congrats to everyone involved in setting the event up, I'm extremely proud of how far PoA-OSUG has gone in its ~18 months of existance. Looking forward to the next one !

The Porto Alegre OSUG along with the SouJava JUG are promoting an OpenSolaris Day in Porto Alegre, Brazil, on April 16th, as a pre-FISL event.

The groups have organized a whole day of Java and OpenSolaris talks in downtown Porto Alegre. Amongst the OpenSolaris subjects are:

- The OpenSolaris Project
- HPC and OpenSolaris
- Project Crossbow: Network Virtualization
- OpenSolaris Kernel: Introduction to the VM and Scheduling systems

More information and online registration at our website