/dev/dump

I'm no longer a Sun Microsystems Employee, since Sun no longer exists. Hopefully I'll get to keep my job at Oracle, but I've not seen any e-mail yet . I expect I will before day's end.

Some of you may know, I've been struggling (and failing) to make auto install work for me. I've had challenges, because my network is not routable, and due to other issues (bugs!) in OpenSolaris Auto Install. However, it seems that I've finally hit on a successful recipe. I want to record this here for others. First, in order to use AI, you will need your installation server to be running a recent build of OpenSolaris. The release notes indicate b128 is sufficient. I just ran "pkg image-update" to update to build 131. If you fail to do this, there won't be a warning at all, its just your clients will simply not boot. The next thing you'll need to do is download a full-repository and the AI image. Unfortunately, there are not public versions of the full repo ISO file available that are "current". (No, I can't get you a copy, and no I don't know why they haven't posted a more recent update.) Hopefully this problem will be correct...

Its hard for me to believe that six years ago today at this hour in the morning I was getting myself ready to meet my bride. We had a wonderful wedding on the beach in front of the Del Mar powerhouse in San Diego, with our friends and family in attendance. Looking back, its been the best six years of my life. I've truly been blessed. I'm looking forward to spending the next sixty together with my beautiful bride Deborah.

So there are a couple of "closed" drivers that are not part of OpenSolaris, and might never be because of redistribution restrictions. However, this represents an opportunity for an enterprising software engineer to contribute. The drivers are glm - Symbios 53x810 and similiar devices qus - QLogic ISP 10160 and similar devices adp - Adaptec AIC 7870P and similar devices cadp - Adaptec AIC 7896 and similar devices There are open source drivers for these from FreeBSD and NetBSD, which could be used as a starting point for a port. I'd probably be interested in trying one of these out myself, if time allowed -- but alas it does not, my plate is already quite full. The best part of these drivers is that there are few, if any, "political" or "business" restrictions on integrating replacement drivers. Indeed, at one point recently each of these was considered for an EOF simply because they weren't considered strategic anymore. (The EOFs were rejected...

I undertook this past weekend an effort to "port" the NetBSD "ex" driver to GLDv3, as an open source replacement for "elxl". It took a bit over 2 days. The new sources are on line in a webrev format. I'd really appreciate feedback. I'm hoping to integrate these changes soon (and I could use help with testing!) This new version, apart from being Open Source, also has with it: 1. Full support for VLANs (including full-MTU frames) 2. Full support for link notification on twisted pair (and hopefully also fiber) 3. Full integration with Brussels for MII and media selection. 4. Full support for Suspend/Resume (S3) 5. Full support for Quiesce (fast reboot) 6. Support for additional devices It can also be extended fairly easily to support Cardbus and MiniPCI variants, and hardware checksum offload. (The checksum offload part is basically written and #ifdef'd out until I find a newer card to test with personally.) What is missing is "automatic...

Happy New Year (2010) everyone! I thought I'd take a second to reflect on the accomplishments of the past year, and look forward to what I think is in store for my contributions to OpenSolaris this year. It's hard to believe that I've been a member of the OpenSolaris community for over 5 years now. (I was a pilot member.) Undoubtedly this past year my biggest contribution to OpenSolaris was the new audio framework ( Boomer ) and many new audio drivers. I did a lot of other work besides, including a bunch of work on NIC drivers (including a new common MII framework and the yge driver which supports Marvell Yukon 2 parts), and various changes to the SDcard framework. I've also developed a device driver for a very interesting (and very high performance) hybrid storage device (which won't be integrating for non-technical reasons), and a new storage framework for block oriented storage devices. (This framework, blkdev , will be integrating once we're out past...