What am I up to these days?
Recently, I putback my last round of major bugfixes in my “traditional” area of expertise – procfs, libproc, mdb, etc. And since I’m not attached to any of the major S10 projects, I can actually pick and choose what to work on next. I have tons of projects I’d love to start, but I can’t justify new projects so late in the release cycle. There are simply too many other things that need to be fixed first. The downside of choice is that eventually, word gets out that you have copious amounts of free time with only two months of development left in the release. I’ve basically been put up for auction, except the bidding price is always the same – though the work itself becomes the reward.
I’ve been spending quality time with our bug database, as well as entertaining offers from potential suitors. I’ve been pinch hitting on the amd64 project, helping out with greenline (SMF), and most recently signed up to help design and implement a new subsystem for ZFS. I’m also getting to play with cool things like ZFS on amd64: we’re getting it up and running on some very cool (and super-secret) hardware that I unfortunately can’t talk about. I’m learning about parts of Solaris that I never thought I’d have a chance to work with. It’s all very exciting, but I will definitely be happy when S10 ships so I can get back to some personal projects that have been evolving in the depths of my mind. Stay tuned…
So, do I hear a hundred? How about two hundred?
2 Responses
This argument is not valid:
We want to have ISVs embedding Solaris in their
set-top box without worrying about how to dance
around the GPL while keeping their IP private.
It’s your code, you can always have a dual license.
For three hundred, could you track down the diffs between sun4d and sun4d6/cray4d support, and perhaps allow me a chance to merge that in with the last Solaris 8 release to support XDbus? See, I’ve got three (soon to be four) SC2000Es, and would love to upgrade them all to Solaris 8, and then bring both of my CS6400s up to the same level.
Right now my Crays are stuck at “Cray Solaris 2.5”, with most of the patches up to 2.6, and in fact a friend/mole within Sun was going to get me a fully-patched, end-of-the-line 2.6 distribution but he disappeared… :-/ I suppose I could run 2.6 on all my Dragons and SuperDragons… in fact, for running NeXT PDO atop Solaris, maybe 2.6 is more appropriate anyway? (Yes, really, I’m interested in running 40KWs worth of SuperSPARC-IIs as the back-end for a NeXTSTEP-hosted Objective-C development effort, sort of one of those “because it’s there!” kinds of things.)
So if you’re really looking for something to do, digging up CS6400 support (including the host key generator…) could be a fun diversion, y’know, rooting about in the past for a while as a contrast to just how far Solaris/SPARC and the industry has come in the last 8 years. Remember when 85Mhz/2MB CPUs were “fast”?
Anyway, I volunteer to help resurrect/preserve/maintain the XDbus support when OpenSolaris is finally loosed on the world. Really, it’ll keep me off the streets.