/dev/dump

(I know its probably questionable using my blog for this, but I thought I'd post it here anyway. My apologies if anyone finds this offensive. I'll keep it brief in any case.) I'm looking for a high-caliber developer, preferably with some kernel and/or OpenSolaris expertise, who's also got extensive knowledge of ActiveDirectory and CIFS. If that's you, or you know someone who fits that description, please contact me -- garrett at nexenta dot com. (No recruiters or agents please.)

So I'm irked, really irked. If we had Skype support for Solaris, I could probably ditch this half baked mess of Linux hosts running VMware guests with OpenSolaris and Nexenta. I want just a single host OS for my development box. Right now the single biggest barrier to running OpenSolaris on my desktop for my job at Nexenta is Skype. But this is silly, because Skype works in Linux, and the APIs should basically be compatible. Especially with the OSS layer that we already have in OpenSolaris these days via Boomer. If someone at Skype sees this (good luck trying to find a contact on their web site!), and wants to work with me on it, I'd be happy to help them work through the issues of getting a native Skype port. If anyone who has an "in" at Skype reads this post, please forward it to your in at Skype. If any folks are paying for business services from Skype, feel free to let them know you want a Solaris client, and there is an expert on the Solaris audio stack waitin...

So, this past weekend my son and I went to LDRS 29, which is the event for the national high-powered rocketry club, Tripoli. We were there only one day and one night, but here were some cool highlights from Saturday: Mass squat launch -- Timothy's Squat with an Aerotech G-67 redline motor flew very nicely, if a bit late off the pad. 28 other rocketeers had their rockets launch at roughly the same time. Many wild squats. With the $29 specials from WhatsUpHobbies, lots of people were flying very unstable Squat rockets with I-140 skidmark engines. This configuration needs nose weight, as we found out for ourselves when we flew Timothy's with the same engine. Four half-scale Patriots launched in 3 second intervals from a "box" launch vehicle -- much like a real Patriot. Very, very cool. Drag race of six or seven N-impulse rockets. These are big rockets, lots of power. Drag race between a number of very detailed rockets. There was a CATO about 20 feet off the pad,...

Noticed this press release got posted to the Nexenta web site. /me preens. :-)

UPDATE (6/21/2010): This problem is apparently solved in b142. Probably other builds as well. But I was unable to reproduce this problem with real hardware on b142. Note that VMware does not honor cache flushing, so VMware (and possibly other v12n users) will potentially still see this issue. So, it turns out that ZFS in recent (somewhere after build 134 apparently) builds has a critical bug ... O_SYNC writes are not really synchronous. This leads to potential data loss. I've not yet figured out which change introduced the bug, but I hope to work on it next week. In the meantime, I would strongly discourage use of post-134 binaries for anything where data integrity is important. I've filed a P1 bug with Oracle for this issue. I'll be trying to nail it down further next week; if I'm able to fix it before Oracle can, I'll offer up my fix. I'll post the CR number when I receive the number back. I imagine that this bug, which is trivially reproducible, will be ...

SpaceX, one of our greatest hopes for a commercial manned space program, has achieved a huge milestone with the successful maiden launch of Falcon-9 with a Dragon capsule today. This is the craft that may one day soon be used for ISS resupply, and perhaps even crew transport. Even as Obama shuts down the US governments manned space program, the commercial sector is picking it up. This is a momentous day. Congratulations to Elon Musk and the rest of the team at SpaceX!

So, we have not had audio in OpenSolaris within VMware since... well, ever. I've been doing some investigation. I'm seeing a situation where the VMware emulated audioens device behaves rather differently from the real hardware. For one, it seems to insist on using real interrupts. In particular, the sample count registers do not appear to be updated unless one receives and acknowledges an interrupt. (By toggling the interrupt enable bit.) This means that this virtualized device will never be able to run "interrupt free" like the other audio devices (or real audio hardware). For another, it appears that the audio device has some weird dependency on the relationship between the size of the audio buffer, and the interrupt rate (the number of samples at which to interrupt). Using different values gives, strange results. Finally, I cannot, for the life of me, figure out how to cause the device to actually trigger an interrupt. I've been able to make some progress...

You may recall my recent blog post about Windows 7 being surprisingly usable . Well, I have to recant here. I used Windows 7 for about a week and half. While it *worked*, it was a pleasure to use. But after three BSODs in just that week and half, I have abandoned it. I'm now running Ubuntu . (Why not OpenSolaris? Because I need the ability to host VMware and Skype, and I can't do that natively on OpenSolaris -- yet.) Sure, I could have called up support -- but Microsoft support is provided by my computer manufacturer, and I didn't feel like spending 3 hours on the phone dealing with tech support while they tried to triage my problem. In the end, it was simply faster and easier for me to reinstall with Linux, even allowing for the time it took to download the media. Sure, the problem might have been my virtualization software, or maybe it was a shoddy audio driver, or maybe it was brokenness in my graphics driver, or maybe it was the 3rd party antivirus software (whic...