Monday March 05, 2007
Monday March 05, 2007 The very first Open Solaris developer conference (www.guug.de/veranstaltungen/osdevcon2007) took place in Berlin Feb 27 - Mar 2 2007. I was really enjoy it, met lots of bright people from Germany itself, US, Ireland, India and even more.
I found that the interest to the "open" development in Germany is quite high. Well, I think that's because German people like clarity and 100% control over whatever they're using -- that's great and this makes "open" Unix systems very popular. As the result, "German Unix User Group" actually is quite large community, it includes contributors from the OpenSolaris and Linux worlds.
Here are the most interesting points, in my opinion, been presented on this conference.
- The Zen of OpenSource by Simon Phipps
Statistically, the ratio of the number of engineers inside a company to the number of engineers outside the company is comparable to zero. So, the idea of "open" environment is not only interesting, but reasonable in terms of business (software products/components development business).
People normally do work on their problems, but also they want to communicate with the rest of the world, working on the similar things, and to contribute the work they've done. Why? Well, everybody has own motivation for doing the contribution -- it can be not only the benefit from improvements made by the others, but it can be also the personal visibility or software promotion or all together.
The more different motivations community members have - more healthy the community is. Diversity is a key point.
If the community consists of engineers working for the same company, or working on the same project, or joining the community for the same reason -- this makes community suspicious. - The OpenSolaris Story by Jim Grisanzio
See his blog at blogs.sun.com/jimgris.
Jim is in charge of OpenSolaris community management, and his statistics basically shows that "open" development works and brings the value:
- 10M lines of code, 35K files;
- 25K members, 72 projects, 42 user groups, 40 communities, 180 mailing lists;
- 50+ universities using OpenSolaris in computer science classes;
- 273 submissions, 145 putbacks (about 30 of them are significant), 7 ARC cases complete (4 in progress).
- Looking into the black-box - how the kernel may impact your application by Thomas Nau
Their guys bought new T2000 1GHz Ultra SPARC T1 machine - 8 cores, 4 threads each, 3MB 12-way L2 cache with 4 banks.
And, they did compare performance of some multi-threaded program with the V100 550MHz Ultra SPARC II machine - single core with 4-way superscalar pipeline, 512kB unified 4-way L2 cache.
Results looks interesting -- 1GHz machine did perform even slower than 512kB one ...
Why ? They did run DTrace in combination with the Sun Studio, and found out lots of memory stalls. Moreover, one memory bank (of four) causes half of all stalls. And even more, 85% of stalls are caused by a single page.
What they did to resolve this ?
Lesson they've learned is: "Forget about clock rates -- the design matters"/etc/system: set consistent_coloring=2
Note that to the moment of the conference time, this issue has been fixed already.
hmmm, it basically shows how critical is to update the kernel with the most recent patches ... - Live media for OpenSolaris
There was actually several presentations about that, and as far I understand, the following OpenSolaris distros can be run "live" (without installation) from various media:
- SchilliX (x86) - driven be Jörg Schilling.
He actually invites everybody to contribute. If you familiar with OpenSolaris, its boot process and so forth, let him know, well even if not, they need to do some web sites staff as well, so let him know anycase :-) - MarTux (SPARC) - Martin Bochnig runs that, he's from Berlin and very enthusiastic.
At his presentation he showed his house, in particular the room he is using as a lab - that's really a warehouse of SPARC hardware. - BeleniX (x86) - Moinak Ghosh is the guy behind that, he is from Bangalor.
If you're thinking about what's the difference between BeleniX and SchilliX, BeleniX basically improves the boot process by compressing the data and putting it to the media in the specific order. Media is normally a CD/DVD, which is good for sequential access, but not efficient enough for the random access, so the main idea is to reduce IO operations and make them sequential.
- SchilliX (x86) - driven be Jörg Schilling.
In particular, how the Name Services cache daemon, Kerberized login, interoperability with the Active Directory and Name Services auto-configuration are plays together.
I feel I've got a bit of energy and ideas, so back to work now.
Trackback URL: http://blogs.sun.com/vl/entry/osdevcon07
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