/dev/dump

I noticed that Sherry Moore just posted a blog entry about Fast Reboot. I wanted to take a few moments to mention a few things, that I think folks should understand. First off, the feature (fast reboot) is really useful -- for manually initiated reboots to perform administration (such as to reboot after installing new kernel bits or a critical patch), its wonderful to skip past the various hardware related initialization, and can really help with downtime costs associated with administrative maintenance tasks like patching. This is especially true for systems with lots of peripheral buses (SCSI, Infiniband, etc.) that take a long time for low-level BIOS to probe and test. In such situations, BIOS initialization can consume several minutes. Reducing this to a few seconds is a compelling idea. However, there are some gotchas that in my opinion people should be aware of when using the variant of this that gets used on panic (). During a panic situation, all bets are off about kernel or...

As some people know, the KCA 2009 was streamed live. The video of my talk on Boomer was archived (as well as other talks) and is available on line. You can watch it here . Note that I highly recommend advancing to about 6:30 in the stream, because the first 6+ minutes was me struggling with laptop/projector incompatibilities. (Would be nice if the folks that posted the video could crop that meaningless bit out.) Other thoughts I had from looking back and reviewing this (which I did for the first time yesterday): A live demo would make it more interesting. Test the equipment compatibility first when presenting. Turn off screen savers. Rehearse the talk before hand. Some points were repeated, which was unfortunate since I had to rush or skip other points. Practice talking more.. especially at the beginning it seems like I didn't know what to do with my hands. Don't be afraid to get out from behind the podium. The podium itself was poorly situated ... the exit sign above my head...

I've pushed the audiovia97 device driver. Those of you with Via 82C686 south bridges will be able to make use of your on-board audio in OpenSolaris builds 121 and beyond. Enjoy.

I presented a paper covering Boomer at Kernel Conference Australia 2009 . I've made the paper and slides available for your enjoyment.

I'm headed to Brisbane for the week -- I'm presenting at Kernel Conference Australia 2009 . I hope to meet other like minded UNIX kernel nerds there. Maybe do some snorkeling as well, although its the off-season there. (But it can hardly be colder than the water in California...)

Some of you kernel hackers may be interested to know about my case ( PSARC 2009/380 ) that eliminates one of the ancient limitations of Solaris -- having STREAMS and non-STREAMS entry points in the same device driver. I've also implemented it and am waiting for the case to time out before I submit the RTI. As part of this, I also implemented a set of changes to the audio stack -- the austr(7D) "speecial" node and driver goes away, and the Sun audio personality sheds about 1,000 lines of complexity. I'll be pushing those changes later, once I've gotten code review feedback. (If you review the changes, please let me know!)

So there was some fallout from my mii push. Elxl devices had a nasty panic, which I fixed in time for build 119. Some older i82557 (iprb) devices had problems as well. The push for this fix went into build 120. To everyone affected, please accept my apologies. Build 120 should be stable for these devices.