OpenSolaris at Fall IDF 2007

By David Stewart (Intel) (138 posts) on September 19, 2007 at 8:42 pm

I'm headed back to Portland after attending the first two days of IDF in San Francisco.

There were four talks which were specific to OpenSolaris at IDF. Here were some impressions.

> Virtualization - presented by a tag team of Sun presenters. The first presenter is a visiting professor who has been working on the Solaris hypervisor, xVM. He painted a vision of virtualization of processing, storage and networking which put Xen-like hypervisors in context with other virtualization. ZFS actualizes storage virtualization today, and Crossbow provides network virtualization. Then a Sun guy talked about Crossbow, which virtualizes a single NIC or group of NICs into an array of virtual NICs, which can be assigned to VM's or to Containers.

> Project Indiana - Ian Murdock, Chief Open Source Strategist at Sun presented the idea to make OpenSolaris much more accessible to a generation of programmers who have grown up accustomed to Linux. In particular, instead of a DVD-sized wad 'o stuff to download for a Solaris install, OpenSolaris will be shrunk to CD size and a modern package management system will be added, similar to Ubuntu. The installer is being modernized as well. Finally, the distribution cadence will become more predictable and simplified.

> Writing Device Drivers for Solaris - Seth Goldberg provided a whirlwind tour of a week-long class on how to write a driver. Seth touched on the DDI/DKI interface, which provides terrific interface stability from generation to generation, the device tree and tips and tricks. There was a demonstration driver source presented as well, and all of the commands to try it out. I'll have to do that when I get home!

Unfortunately, I have to miss Day 3 of IDF which will have the Predictive Self Healing talk. It'll be quite good - I looked through the materials - sorry I will miss it! But, my oldest daughter is a freshman at University of Oregon, and I have to move her into the dorm tomorrow!

Categories: Events, Open Source, Virtualization

Comments (1)

September 21, 2007 6:15 AM PDT


Jim Grisanzio		 Thanks for the summary!

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