Saturday June 30, 2007

Phil Harman from Sun's Solaris group gave an informative and amusing talk at the HPC Consortium meeting in Dresden this week titled, "A Brief History of Solaris." I'm hoping the full talk will be posted on the Consortium site at some point.

Phil began his history of Solaris by reminding us of some of the "prehistoric" innovations in SunOS. For example, who but Sun was doing open network computing back in the 1980s with innovations like NFS, NIS, the automounter, XDR, and RPC? How about the STREAMS abstraction? mmap? ld.so?

He then moved to innovations done by Sun "within living memory." His list included loadable, configurable kernels; dynamic system domains; /proc; truss; the p-tools; and /etc/nsswitch.conf. Not to mention "audacious" SMP scalability, and a compatible 32/64 bit transition strategy that maintained binary investments through our transition to 64-bit computing. Oh yes, and there was that Java thing as well...

Innovations done "just yesterday" included Hierarchical Lgroup Support (HLS), Multiple Page Size Support (MPSS), containers, Service Management Facility (SMF), zones, BrandZ, ZFS, and DTrace.

He finished with some comments on ZFS, which he motivated with the graphic I've placed at the top of this blog post. It illustrates the problems of single-bit errors. In this case, a printer was fined by the King of England for what amounted to a life's wages for making this error in a 1631 edition of the King James bible (known as the Wicked Bible). "Got checksums?", asks Phil as he noted that ZFS protects the datapath all the way from the rotating rust (the disk) to memory.

Does the "I" in RAID mean "Inexpensive" or "Independent"? The former is correct, so why do some in our industry prefer the "independent" interpretation? Phil explained why during his talk and also in this blog entry.