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I know this is somewhat controversial for some people, but.... A member of my staff (Alex Stetsenko) has pushed an implementation of "beadm" that is in C. This is actually derived from an earlier C implementation we already had in tree, called "tbeadm", which we already had. So at some level, this consolidation of two different implementations into a single one. As part of this work, the tbeadm version was modernized and improved to provide i18n capabilities and to behave truly as a drop-in replacement for the python version. As a result of this change, python is no longer needed at runtime by illumos for anything except IPS packaging. Sites and distributions which do not use IPS packaging (most distros don't, actually) no longer need to install python.

I drove across country last weekend, and am in Corinth, MS. I'd be happy to go out for a beer and some chat if there are any illumos fans or OSUGs nearby this week.

I just integrated a new sed (1) port for illumos. This is derived from FreeBSD , but it includes a fix for a race condition, and support for translated messages. (FreeBSD friends, please feel free to include these changes back -- I've not changed the original BSD license.) The legacy sed is gone. This new sed should work on all the old sed scripts, but there were a few tricky parts that changed -- if you relied on parsing the output of the "l" command, or on the fact that legacy sed only treated content as a byte stream rather than multibyte characters, you might be affected. Also, I've run into at least one sed script which was malformed, but mistakenly accepted by old sed, but which the new version doesn't accept (but instead gives you a meaningful error message.) The biggest features in the new sed code: support for -i and -I support for -E to enable EREs much more helpful error messages ("command garbled" was just not very specific) Enjoy, and plea...

So we've done some more research, largely following up on work done by Richard Elling, and I have an update on the SAS/SATA expander problem . There is at least some good news here. The problems that we've had in the past with these have centered around "reset storms", where a single reset expands into a great number of resets, and I/O throughput quickly diminishes to zero. The problem is that when a reset occurs on an expander, it aborts any in-flight operations, and they fail. Unfortunately, the *way* in which they fail is to generate a generic "hardware error". The problem is that the sd(7d) driver's response to this is to ... issue another reset, in a futile effort to hopefully correct things. Now the problem is that this behavior is also performed, by default, for media errors as well. E.g. if you have a disk that has a bad sector on it. Of course, if your disk is mostly idle, it won't be a problem. But if you have a lot of I/O going on, ...

I sent this out earlier today: We are working with the Software Freedom Law Center & Eben Moglen on the creation of the illumos legal entity. Nexenta have enlisted the help of Damien Eastwood (one of the more prominent former Sun lawyers) to help drive this. Jason Yoho at Nexenta is driving this fairly hard as well, so there are now more people than just me pushing this forward as quickly as we can. We have set a goal that the legal entity (an illumos foundation) should exist with legal presence before the year's end. I'm told that this is an achievable goal. I'll have more updates on this soon, I expect, but the process is moving forward.

I'm pleased to announce the addition of Albert Lee (trisk@nexenta.com, aka Triskelios on IRC) to the list of Advocates who can approve integrations into illumos. Albert has been doing a lot of excellent work on both illumos and OpenIndiana, and I'm happy to expand the set of advocates we have available to include such a diligent and talented individual. The current list of Advocates for illumos-gate are: Garrett D'Amore Albert Lee Rich Lowe Gordon Ross I'm hoping to expand the list to include more non-Nexenta-employees as well. If you're a contributor and would like to help out in this way, let me know. Typically becoming an advocate means you have earned the trust of the rest of the advocates by making several "good" integrations into illumos-gate (4-5 at least usually, although some credit is given for previous integration experience with ON at Sun/Oracle), and have a demonstrated level of thoroughness to help us ensure quality integrations. Thanks, a...

For a variety of byzantine reasons, the iprb driver has never been open sourced, even though everyone who's ever actually had anything to do with it agrees that it should be. (I blame the lawyers on this one...) So I went ahead and reimplemented -- from scratch -- a new iprb driver. I'd certainly appreciate feedback on the code, which you can read in the webrev . I'm hoping to integrate this into illumos later this week.

As of the recent integration of a colleague of mine, illumos now has a zfs command that does not depend on python at all. changeset: 13246:fe5d6e0b0bce tag: tip user: Alexander Stetsenko date: Wed Dec 01 02:30:25 2010 +0300 description: 278 get rid zfs of python and pyzfs dependencies Reviewed by: gordon.w.ross@gmail.com Reviewed by: trisk@opensolaris.org Reviewed by: alexander.r.eremin@gmail.com Reviewed by: jerry.jelinek@joyent.com Approved by: garrett@nexenta.com The zfs command is now entirely a C program. This may make it more friendly for use in other environments or platforms. FreeBSD folks, you might want to incorporate this into your tree. If you do, I'd sure like to know.