Solaris

Congrats to the OpenSolaris team for 2009.06

Although I'm not working actively on OpenSolaris any more, I was happy to see the launch today of OpenSolaris 2009.06. See Glenn's announcement email here.

The download of the LiveCD distro went down without a hitch, and was surprisingly fast for the day of launch. Kudos to whomever set up the web infrastructure for day-of-launch. (I think Intel could learn something from you guys...)

Intel's Virtualization for Directed I/O (a.k.a IOMMU) Part 1

IOMMU's or Input/Output Memory Management Unit is a new entrant to the x86 world. This is something which has existed in the risc based systems for quite some time. You can get a brief introduction on the concept of what an IOMMU is all about from the
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOMMU

Basically an IOMMU brokers any DMA request on behalf of an IO device translating IO virtual address much the same way as the processor MMU complex performs translation of a virtual address to physical address.

PowerTOP: Dave enters a video game

Always wanted to see Dave Stewart fragged, as in "killed in a video game" ?


Yes, I knew you did. Ah, yet another analogy goes haywire.


This is another in a series of digital shorts about work Intel is doing in OpenSolaris. (Have I really done 15 of these things). This one is about PowerTOP, and how you can use it to "green" your software applications and drivers. I also talk about our use of DTrace to collect the information. And too, the video production guys have fun with a few special effects as well. Enjoy.

Sun + Intel + OpenSolaris + 2 Years = The Year of Core

Today is the second anniversary of the Sun and Intel joint agreement to optimize the Solaris operating system for Intel Xeon processors. Like last year, when I wrote this summary of our work, I decided to recap where we are to date.

Like last year’s edition, this is pretty much off the top of my head.

How open is OpenSolaris ?

I have always wondered what makes a successful open source project, especially since i worked extensively on Linux and now working on OpenSolaris. Dave Stewart did a presentation a while back on the same subject in another conference. Iam not an expert about all open source projects in general, but only familier with Linux and Solaris... so we are just speaking kernel only here.

OpenSolaris and Nehalem - a digital short

Another in the series of 5-minute videos on OpenSolaris and Xeon Processors.

This one is about the details in our work on the Intel Core i7 processor, previously known as the codename "Nehalem". The community has been busting hump all year with a laser focus on optimizing OpenSolaris and Solaris for Nehalem. And why not? The architecture has some truly new and exciting advancements for Intel.

Hope you like it - appreciate your comments.


Original video source

Does "popular" mean "better" in open source?

Here in the West, having a hit is considered the mark of success.

If you do something that is really insanely great, it should become incredibly popular, no matter what the critics or the bloggers say. There are plenty of movies and books that are considered a "critical success" because the experts love the art. But being a critical success is considered a back-handed complement, since "success" equals "popular" in our mindset.

My favorite OpenSolaris 2008.11 features

The next OpenSolaris binary release is due to launch any time now. It's turning into a pretty slick and sexy desktop release. Here are some of my favorite features:

As I previously wrote here, I am trying out one of the latest builds on my Intel Centrino 2 processor based laptop, a Sony VAIO VGN-Z540. ie, the latest and greatest.

OpenSolaris and Centrino 2

Last summer, Intel launched our latest mobile computing platform, branded Intel Centrino 2 processor technology. For a long time as we were doing OpenSolaris development, I used to know this platform by its codename "Montevina", but that's all history now. Long live Centrino 2!

This new mobile platform has some great features, like a multi-core processor, great battery life, new graphics and wireless technologies.

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