Archive for August, 2004
ZFS 101
In case you missed it, Matt Ahrens has a great post talking about ZFS. It’s nice to see this conversation finally beginning; we have been itching to see this out in the public for far too long. Every step we take (Solaris Express, blogs.sun.com, OpenSolaris) brings us closer to our customers and the Solaris community. [...]
Kernel Debugging with KMDB
I’ve talked a lot in the past about kernel debugging, usually comparing the Solaris tools against what’s available in Linux and other Operating Systems. I thought that I’d walk through a concrete example of kernel debugging, first with our debugger KMDB (which replaced the venerable kadb in build 61 of Solaris 10), and then with [...]
And now for something completely different
In a departure from all my previous blog posts, I thought I’d try my hand at a personal entry. Yesterday, the Olympic Track and Field competitions began, with the U.S. taking Silver in the Men’s shot put. What was supposed to be a sweep ended up in disaster: Cantwell never qualified at the trials, Godina [...]
So now Linux is innovative?
I just ran across this interview with Linus. If you’ve read my blog, you know I’ve talked before about OS innovation, particularly with regards to Linux and Solaris. So I found this particular Linus quote very interesting: There’s innovation in Linux. There are some really good technical features that I’m proud of. There are capabilities [...]
Solaris Paleontology
In the footnote a few days ago, I commented on the fact that the history of Solaris debugging could rougly be divded into three ‘eras’. As someone interested in UNIX history, I decided to dig through the Solaris archives and put together a chronology of Solaris debuggability and observability tools. For fun, I divided it [...]
Missing the big picture
I just saw this article the other day, and was amazed that someone could so clearly miss the point of OpenSolaris and Sun’s business strategy. In the article, the (apparently anonymous) author tries to argue that Jonathan and Adam are on two opposing sides of an internal corporate struggle between the executivess and the engineers [...]
Debugging the Debugger
I’ve been missing almost a week, mostly because of my involvement with the amd64 bringup effort. A while ago, I was recruited to get the ptools and mdb up and running in 64-bit mode. This certainly made me appreciate some of the old war stories – all the Solaris veterans have their favorite bug that [...]
More on OS innovation
The other day on vacation, I ran across a Slashdot article on UNIX branding and GNU/Linux. Tne original article was mildy interesting, to the point where I actually bothered to read the comments. Now, long ago I learned that 99% of Slashdot comments are worthless. Very rarely to you find thoughtful and objective comments; even [...]
Our numbers are growing
More Solaris engineers are joining the blogging community every day. Recently we’ve been joined by Resource Management guru Andrei Dorofeev, Service Management Facility guru Liane Praza, and ZFS guru Matt Ahrens. Be sure to check out their blogs, as well as the other blogs listed at right; you’re bound to find some cool stuff and [...]