Archive for the ‘illumos’ Category
The USE Method: SmartOS Performance Checklist
The USE Method provides a strategy for performing a complete check of system health, identifying common bottlenecks and errors. For each system resource, metrics for utilization, saturation and errors are identified and checked. Any issues discovered are then investigated using further strategies. In this post, I’ll provide an example of a USE-based metric list for [...]
In: illumos, omnios, performance, smartos, Solaris, usemethod, zones
illumos and ZFS days
Back in October I was pleased to attend — and my employer, Delphix, was pleased to sponsor — illumos day and ZFS day, run concurrently with Oracle Open World. Inspired by the success of dtrace.conf(12) in the Spring, the goal was to assemble developers, practitioners, and users of ZFS and illumos-derived distributions to educate, share [...]
In: HSP, illumos, OpenSolaris, OracleSolaris, talk, ZFS
illumos hackathon 2012: user-land types for DTrace
At the illumos hackathon last week, Robert Mustacchi and I prototyped better support for manipulating user-land structures. As anyone who’s used it knows, DTrace is currently very kernel-centric — this both reflects the reality of how operating systems and DTrace are constructed, and the origins of DTrace itself in the Solaris Kernel Group. Discussions at [...]
In: DTrace, hackathon, illumos, pid, user-land
Per-thread caching in libumem
libumem was developed in 2001 by Jeff Bonwick and Jonathan Adams. While the Solaris implementation of malloc(3C) and free(3C) performed adequately for single threaded applications, it did not scale. Drawing on the work that was done to extend the original kernel slab allocator, Jeff and Jonathan brought it to userland in the form of libumem. [...]
In: illumos, libc, libumem, mdb, SunOS
ZFS+10: illumos meetup
ZFS recently celebrated its informal 10th anniversary; to mark the occasion, Delphix hosted a ZFS-themed meetup for the illumos community (sponsored generously by Joyent). Many thanks to Deirdre Straughan, the new illumos community manager, for helping to organize and for filming the event. Three of my colleagues at Delphix presented work they’ve been doing in [...]
ZFS 10th anniversary
Exactly 10 years ago today, Jeff Bonwick and Matt Ahrens got their first ZFS prototype working in user-land. Jeff had scrapped his previous attempt at reinventing filesystems, working through the established filesystem management and engineering channels at Sun, and this time started with a clean sheet of paper. Matt had joined Sun that June shortly [...]
In: Delphix, halloween, illumos, JeffBonwick, MattAhrens, ZFS
illumos hackathon on October, 24
On Monday, the Delphix systems crew is rolling down the 101 to the illumos hackathon in San Jose. Anyone who’s working on illumos, developing illumos-derived technologies like ZFS or DTrace, or who wants to cut some OS code, should drop by. Here’s the sign up. What’s a hackathon? Not exactly sure, but we’re hoping to [...]
DTrace for Linux
Yesterday (October 4, 2011) Oracle made the surprising announcement that they would be porting some key Solaris features, DTrace and Zones, to Oracle Enterprise Linux. As one of the original authors, the news about DTrace was particularly interesting to me, so I started digging. I should note that this isn’t the first time I’ve written [...]
In: DTrace, illumos, Linux, OEL, OOW, OpenSolaris, Oracle, Solaris
BayLISA talk
In May I gave a talk at BayLISA about DTrace and the DTrace book. The slides are available here – although the talk deviated as I ran various live demos. It was videoed, and the first part is here: In this talk spoke about Dynamic Tracing separately from DTrace, as understanding what dynamic tracing can [...]
In: baylisa, DTrace, illumos, video
Beyond Oracle
It’s been a little over six months since I left Oracle to join Delphix. I’m not here to dwell on the reasons for my departure, as I think the results speak for themselves. It is with a sad heart, however, that I look at the work so many put into making OpenSolaris what it was, [...]
