/dev/dump

During the first days of October 2012, we had an illumos day , and a one day illumos hackathon that was very well attended by some of the best and brightest in our community (and I daresay, in any  open source community.) The purpose of the hackathon, besides just doing some cool projects, is to give folks a chance to interact with other domain experts, and code, particularly in areas outside  their particular area of expertise. This year a number of interesting projects were worked on, and I think some of these are at the point of starting to bear fruit.  The project I undertook was the addition of post-mortem analysis support for pfiles (1).  That is, making it possible to use pfiles against a core (4) file.  Adam Leventhal suggested the project, and provided the initial suggestion on the method to use for doing the work. This is a particularly interesting project, because the information that pfiles reports is located in kernel state (in the uarea) and has not traditionally b

A couple of months ago I purchased the rather expensive pair of Apple in-ear earphones, to replace an older pair of standard earbuds I'd given to someone else.  They never fit my ear correctly, and I hated them. Recently I've also taken up getting more physically fit -- so going to the gym more often, including spending a lot of time running on the treadmill. But my earphones kept falling out.  And my iPhone 4 is kind of heavy and inconvenient. So I picked up the iPod nano (7th gen) today at Best Buy.  And it comes with a new style of earbud. I've been wearing them now for about 7 hours, including a fairly intense 40 minutes of running on the treadmill.  They haven't budged once.  And while I'm no audiophile, the audio quality seems  to be better than any of the other earbuds I've used. And the nano -- really light, really nice.  It doesn't do everything, and I've not tried out all the functions yet, but for playing music, it works great.  And

My company, DEY Storage Systems , is in the process of creating a new product around the illumos operating system.  As you might imagine, this product includes a variety of open and proprietary source code.  The product itself is not delivered as a separate executable, but as a complete product.  We don't permit our customers to crack it open, both from the sense of protecting our IP, but also to protect our support and release engineering organizations -- our software releases consist only of a single file and we don't supply tools or source for other parties to modify that file. One of the pieces that we wanted to integrate into the tree is an excellent little piece of software called Zookeeper , produced by the Apache organization.  Like illumos, Zookeeper has a nice non-viral copyleft license, which makes it nice for integration into our product. However, I discovered that as part of our integration, one of my engineers had decided to integrate GNU grep.  Why? Becaus