/dev/dump

I've posted draft inception materials for our PSARC case, 2008/318, for Boomer. Boomer is the code name for the effort to integrate a modern OSS-compatible API, and additional drivers, into Solaris. PSARC inception review for this case is scheduled for November 5, 2008. Please check the ARC web page for call in details (any engineer in the community may dial in.) Be advised that the meeting is an engineering meeting, though. (PSARC provides engineering architectural review for projects.) We have a working prototype for most of the bits we are ARC'ing at this point, and I expect to be opening up the source code tree, and binary test bits, in the coming weeks. Perhaps by Thanksgiving.

A new position in Austin, TX has opened in my group (onsite only). This is for a junior or mid-level administrator or QA type person -- great for someone who loves playing with new hardware, software, etc. No specific programming skills beyond every day scripting required (though perl and C would probably be useful.) Send replies back to me. (Full disclosure: I get a referral bonus for anyone I refer.)

Some folks might be interested in this. I used to hack on NetBSD at my previous job. I recently had an inquiry from a recruiter at Microsoft (don't worry Neal, I'm not going anywhere! :-) which I thought I'd share here. Location : Redmond, WA Client: Microsoft. Job Description: Seeking a talented NetBSD software developer interested in helping Danger (a subsidiary of Microsoft ) ship the next generation of Danger’s Sidekick platform. Specifically, we’re looking for NetBSD developers interested in commercializing the NetBSD platform for an embedded mobile computing device, focusing on performance and optimization, bug fixing, and integration with Danger’s higher-level platform code, with an emphasis on kernel and driver support. Qualifications: - 8+ years of software development experience - 8+ years experience with C - Strong understanding of OS concepts (particularly with NetBSD) such as multi-threaded program design and synchr...

OpenSolaris 2008.11 is coming soon. Build 101 is the stabilization build before it, and as usual, new features are excluded from this build. So we can say pretty certainly what features are in, and what are out. While there are a lot of new features coming in this release, there are some in particular that I've been more involved with. SDcard support. Numerous laptops can now use SDcard and MultiMediaCard media directly. A good way to know if you're laptop is one of them is to search for pciclass,0805 in the output of prtconf -vp . While it isn't completely conclusive (in particular some models from Texas Instruments are schizophrenic here), if you see this, there's an excellent chance it will work. I'd always like to hear feedback about this feature -- if your unit works, or doesn't work, let me know. (Also, of course, the Tadpole SPARCLE models are supported. ) AudioHD improvements. Notably, many more laptops will now have working audio. The a...

Okay, maybe not so ancient (circa 2000), but I recently got an e-mail from the Sun IT group notifying me about changes that impacted web pages I set up for Alternate Pathing, which was the very first project I did that involved work within the Solaris kernel. Apparently they didn't notice that I'd left the company and returned. Of course Alternate Pathing was canceled a long time ago, although someone may still be using it on older E10K Solaris 8 systems. Here's the Sun internal URL to which the e-mail referred. The bug tracking pages are broken, since the scripts behind them were developed (by me) to talk to the BugTraq+ Sybase server, which Sun hasn't used in ~forever.