/dev/dump

You may be aware that we have selected two candidates for the slots allocated by Google to illumos -- the first is to replace some system utilities from code in perl to native C. The second of which is to bring GRUB2 to illumos. What you may not know, is that Nexenta will be sponsoring three additional candidates to pursue projects of their own to benefit illumos. These candidates have been selected already, and we will have more to say about them and their work in the future. Stay tuned!

Joyent have continued to demonstrate their commitment to and support of illumos . In addition to a string of recent source code integrations, they are now hosting some of our infrastructure in their cloud, with more to follow. After moving the stuff there, we're now enjoying significantly better performance, and enhanced functionality. Try out the new OpenGrok instance yourself to see! I'd also like to give a special thank you to Circonus , who are providing active monitoring services for our site now, as a gratuity to illumos. Apparently, they're going to be hosting their stuff on illumos based systems as well, so there's additional synergy here.

So there has been some things brewing in a sub-sect of the illumos community about a project to fork illumos, because of alleged problems with my leadership. You can read the thread here if you want. I want to address this head on. First the claim is that I've got omnipotent control over illumos. This is absolutely false. While I created the project, and serve as technical lead, I've offered to step down if the developer-council and admin-council would like to me to do so. Notably my employer (Nexenta) has minority representation on both councils, and I've tried to keep the groups as neutral as possible. I said when I created the illumos project, and I still maintain, illumos is a community project, not a Nexenta one. I'm working on the process to make this more formal through non-profit governance. I should have more to say here before the end of week. (I've got a meeting about this today.) I've also handed over determination of the Advocate list (th...

Joyent posted an update -- they've released a branch of illumos , on github, containing much of their illumos contributions. Some of the stuff is probably fairly Joyent specific, but some of it is highly useful to almost everyone using illumos! From their mail: ZFS I/O fair-share scheduling for zones the Joyent brand, which can be used as a template for other non-SysVR4 or IPS zone brands Reintroduction of sparse zone images Crossbow vnics on demand for zones & non-unique vnic naming (unique per zone, not per system) svcs enhancements ( svcs -Z/-z for interrogating zone services, -L for outputting log files directly (no more ls /var/svc/log | grep... )) vfsstat and iostat tweaks and ziostat, iostat(1M) for ZFS I/O more per-zone IO kstats the zonemon utility for zone kernel state troubleshooting DTrace enhancements such as llquantize I just want to say again, thank you very much Joyent! Now, how quickly can we merge this stuff into illumos mainline?

I'm looking for people interested in contributing content to the illumos website. Right now we have a test website but it needs help with producing content. First and foremost we need English content, but the new framework will support other localizations as well. If you're interested in contributing here, drop me an email. I'll be setting up a mailing list for this soon.