First Tadpole code review posted

The first review for Tadpole platform support is online now. Please let me know your thoughts, after reading it. There will be more good stuff coming soon, I hope. (Also, if you have a Tadpole platform other than a SPARCLE or UltraBook IIi, and are willing to test, please let me know!)

Thanks!

Who's Who?

I just received two e-mails (identical to each other) stating this:

Dear DAmore Garrett,

The Heritage Registry of Who's Who is recognizing you for possible inclusion in the upcoming 2007-08 Edition. Please go to http://theheritageregistryofwhoswho.com and click on the invitation button.

Thank You,

Chris Jespersen

I'm not entirely convinced this is a worthwhile thing... but I'm willing to play along until they ask me for money. Anyone else out there received these before?

Tadpole project proposed

FYI, I recently proposed a new project to track improvements to support for Tadpole platforms in OpenSolaris. It looks like it got the seconds needed, so I'm just waiting for the infrastructure to be created.

first putback!

I just made my first putback to ON (6487387 pcic driver contains obsolete & private Tadpole code that should be removed).

While this is nothing earth shattering, hopefully I'll be making a lot more commits soon.

Inland Empire Solaris Users?

I've been wondering how many other OpenSolaris users there are out there in the Inland Empire. I recently met one close to me, which surprised me quite a bit. I figured I was the only one within at least a 30 mile radius.

If there are others of you out there, please drop me a line. I'd like to inquire as to whether it makes sense to consider starting a User's Group for the area. Possibly we could join up with any other User Groups for Southern California.

For the record I live in southwest Riverside county, not far from Temecula and Murrieta. (For those of you not familiar with the west coast, the Inland Empire refers to a large region of southern California that is separated from the coastal areas of Orange and Los Angeles counties by a range of coastal mountains. I often have joked that I'm about 65 miles from any natural technology center, but now I'm not so sure. And I think a lot of people who commute to places like San Diego and LA live out here.)

ancient history (IEN-116 must die!)

Funny note. When I came back to Sun (two weeks ago), I discovered that an ancient PSARC case (2002/356) for the removal of the Trivial Name Server (in.tnamed) had never been completed. So for 5-odd years since we've continued to ship this long-since-obsolete protocol. I'm going to go ahead and drive forward with the actual removal... at the time I did it as a case study in how much process was involved with even a simple EOF. Lets see how long this one takes. (For the record, the IEN-116 protocol was obsolete as far back as 1986, when J. Postel first requested vendors ditch it.)

afe and mxfe pending updates

Those of you using afe (and also mxfe) will be pleased to note that the time is fast approaching when afe will hopefully be integrated into Solaris Nevada. There is a PSARC fasttrack scheduled for it next week if I understand correctly. (I don't have the case number yet.)

There are a few ramifications of this. One of the most immediate is that I'm going to be winding down support for versions of Solaris earlier than 10. In fact, I no longer have any personal installations running anything less than S10u3, and most everything is running Nevada.

The other reason for me to do this is so that I can immediately start taking advantage of some features that are present in Solaris 10 and Nevada. For example, I want to add support for DLPI link notification, and ultimately (in Nevada) port to GLDv3.

The GLDv3 has some compelling features, and as a result afe and mxfe will gain support for features like vlans, jumbo frames, and interrupt blanking. And, they'll also benefit from the increased performance gains afforded by the GLDv3 framework.

It isn't clear to me that I'll be supporting GLDv3 for Solaris 10 (the interfaces are not yet public), but at least in Nevada I will. And even for S10, I'll probably be using new GLDv2 features that are not available to older releases. (Like the DLPI link notification.)

Before I do this, I will be spinning one last significant bug fix release for afe and mxfe, which addresses several significant bugs found by Sun's QA group. (Including the fact that afe has not functioned properly with multicast since it was first written!)

Watch the web page for more details.