Presentation at Chinese Academy of Science

Last week I gave a presentation to a group of college students from Chinese Academy of Science (CAS). The presentation was part of OpenSolaris programming contest held in China. And my presentation was about Solaris network programming and the FireEngine architecture in Solaris 10. Most of the students have little experience with Solaris, but I believe many of them know a lot about Linux and Windows.

The presentation lasted about two hours, and it surely became the longest one I ever had. During the presentation, I gave a demo on STREAMS using the upmod from Sasha's blog. By using truss(1), DTrace(1M), and mdb(1), I showed to the students how to push and pop a module from a stream, how to extract data from a mblk, and how flow control works.

 The students were attracted by the demo. There were many questions after the demo and the presentation was over. Since most of them heard about STREAMS for the first time, (even if STREAMS is described from some of the famous UNIX book such as APUE and UNP, they simply ignored the part because they don't have SVR derived UNIX environment), most of the questions were about STREAMS and how FireEngine addressed the drawbacks of STREAMS.

Hope the presentation helps more Chinese students be comfortable with using Solaris. After all, UNIX is not widely used as desktop in China.