Wednesday June 29, 2005

Current activities

It's been a little while since I have written about a topic in Solaris Kernel. I'll soon blog on how Preemption (both user and kernel level) works in Solaris. With the help of Jonathan Chew, Andrei Doffee and Eric Saxe in Solaris Kernel Development, I'm currently working on a project which will enable you to specify multi-CPU binding and define affinity between the processes/lwps. We are still in the stage of drafting and developing a prototype. I'm getting to learn lgroup (latency group) and HLS (Hierarchical Lgroup Support) too. lgroup improves the performance on NUMA (Non-uniform memory access) machines like E15k, E25k, Serengeti 6800 and so on. It is my pleasure to work with Solaris Kernel Development engineers on this project. I'm sure I'll learn loads of things as we go along.

In the meantime, we recently cracked a problem in Solaris which delayed the response of a thread when a signal was pending. These days my fellow colleague Sudheer Abdul Salam (we call him hot gun in Solaris Kernel Sustaining group) parterns with all of us when working on a bug. We truely believe in team building and dont' hesitate to take help from others. At the same time, we don't hesitate in cracking pranks too :-)

Now that our group owns picld(1), I've been little busy with few bugs too in this area. picld(1) has interfaces which allows you to get the platform information in a tree form manner (abstract configuration of the system). The current users of picld(1m) interfaces are prtpicl(1m) and SunMC and I'm sure third-party applications will be using picld too. 

This weekend (2nd/3rd July) I'm going for a long drive and a long trek too. I'm hoping that it'll just rain and rain. Weather in Bangalore is rejuvenating us (my uncle and myself) and western ghats are attracting us again with their lush green forests and beautiful mountain ranges.