Five-seven

This week (Tuesday and Wednesday) my father took my 8-year old daughter to Joshua Tree National Park to do some rock climbing. She'd done some simpler climbing before, briefly, a few years ago, and had enjoyed it. (Of course, she did awesome, and everyone around seemed quite impressed by her awesome instincts. Watching her route-find, and use hand holds and moves with flexibility that I can only dream about being able to do was very, very cool.)

The added bonus here was that I was invited to go along as well -- I had never been rock climbing before, and I was anxious to try it myself. (Dad's been climbing for about two years now, and talking about it pretty much continuously since -- now I think I know why.) It was awesome! First off Joshua Tree National Park is absolutely amazing... and it's only about 90 minutes away by car from where I live -- I can't believe I've been missing out on this. (Even if you don't rock climb, there are some beautiful hikes, world-class rock scrabbling -- which is basically half-way between climbing and hiking -- no rope required -- usually, and the natural beauty of the place is astonishing.)

But what was really cool was the climbing. Over two days, we did a number of different climbs (all top-rope climbs), varying from about 5.4 to 5.7. (This is a scale of difficulty, which is too much to explain here.) Prior to the 5.6 and 5.7 climbs, I recall looking up with butterflies in my stomach thinking, "I'm going to climb what? Surely you jest!" (Looking for a foothold on a vertical face, that might be less than a quarter inch wide... and then actually being able to use it to hold your entire weight... well you've got to try it to believe it. Climbing shoes stick like glue.)

During the climb, the butterflies completely vanished, and I was able to focus on getting the job done. (Probably because I never looked further down than my next foothold...)

The best part, after having done it, was the endorphin high at the top, having actually done the climb without giving up, and without actually falling (though a fall is only a couple of inches with a belayed top-rope). Its a huge sense of achievement. To anyone who's not tried this before, I highly recommend it.

Yeah, I'll be going back. It was cool out-climbing Dad (gee, wonder where I got that competitve gene) on the final 5.7, but I'm disappointed that I didn't try one of the 5.9 routes he did on the first day, and I definitely want to go back and do the multi-pitch climb that we turned back on after Brandy got an understandable case of the jitters and chills. (Hanging out on a windy ledge about nearly 100 vertical feet up, knowing that there were three more pitches to go, I certainly sympathized with her sudden onset of acrophobia.)

Congrats to the new OGB

The results of the OpenSolaris 2008 ballot are in -- congratulations to the members-elect. It looks like a solid group of folks, and I am encouraged for the new year! (On a side node, I'd like to have seen a bit more representation from non-Sun employees, but the elected members are all folks I believe have a high level of integrity, and will serve the community's interests well.)

I voted!

I just recorded my vote in OpenSolaris. If you're a Core Contributor, please go to poll.opensolaris.org for instructions to register your vote!

For the curious, I voted FOR the two amendments, and my priority list is for a public bug system, public RTI system, SPARC build farm, x64 build farm, and to clean up inactive CGs.

I am not reporting my OGB selections, other than to say that it included a mix of candidates from Sun and non-Sun candidates, and included some former OGB/CAB members, and some fresh faces.

return of iwk

Owners of laptops with Intel 4965 802.11n hardware will be glad to know, iwk has returned. Hopefully, all the legal confusion is sorted out properly this time, so it should be here to stay. For very small technical changes, there was a lot of work involved to make this happen, and a big thank-you to everyone who got it done, and to the community who've been patient with us while we made sure we were Doing The Right Thing.

Now I just need to get one of my own.

What me, impulsive? Nah....

Well at least I'm not the only one in my household. But it can be really fun. The past week has been a great example of this.

For our 4th anniversary last month, my wife and I bought a 56 gallon freshwater setup. At the time we had a 10 gallon setup and 2.5 gallon that we were using to house babies from our livebearers. (Platy/swordtail hybrids, I think.)

That was about 3 weeks ago.

Today, we have a 46 gallon bow front, a 20 gallon, and another 10 gallon. Plus the 56 gallon and original 10 gallon tank. (Now both my of my daughters have their own 10g freshwater setup, the wife has the 46 g for her community ... mostly she wants a home for more more mollies and a peacock eel, but also probably some angels and a few red-eye tetras.)

The pet store had a sale. We uhm, went a little crazy. (A complete 20G freshwater setup was only $40.)

The 56 gallon display tank (24" tall) got converted to saltwater. This is my first marine tank. I only got it filled up last night. (And let me tell you, at about $5/lb, live rock is expensive. Between live rock, live sand, and water -- 89 cents/gallon, I've already spent about $300, and I've not even put any fish in it yet! That doesn't include the tank and equipment of course.) The setup is going to be a FOWLR (fish-only with live rock) tank.

To really get the full picture though, you need to picture me standing out in the cold wind and rain, in wet jeans, barefoot, hosing the 56 gallon out to make sure I've flushed out any freshwater bacteria properly. I must be half nuts. But Debbie came out and helped me, so I'm not the only one.

What is really cool is that my wife has had as much fun with this as I have. I am fortunate indeed to be married to a woman who enjoys so many of the same things I do.

Now we just need to wait.... and wait... and wait.... (New salt water tanks need to "cycle" for about 3-4 weeks before adding fish.)

Brussels putback

This post discusses the 2nd flag-day putback yesterday, which is Brussels (phase I). Brussels also changes the way NIC drivers are administered, but it is focused on simplifying and centralizing the administration of network driver tunables -- these are the values used to tune the device itself, or in some cases, the link layer properties. The most common of these tunables are the values associated with duplex and link speed settings.

Historically these values have been configured with ndd(1M) or driver.conf(4). Many people know how I feel about those methods, but let me just reiterate: "ndd must die!" (And driver.conf, as well.)

The Brussels putback represents another opportunity for community members interested in kernel programming though. A lot of these NIC drivers need to be converted to use the property access methods that Brussels offers, and have the ndd support ioctls removed. (And yes, I strongly desire to see the ndd(1M) ioctl support removed from drivers. A follow-on phase for Brussels will offer ndd compatibility at the Brussels layer.)

Brussels provided a conversion of bge(7d), but many other NIC drivers remain. I plan on converting my two drivers, afe(7d) and mxfe(7d), as well as a few drivers that are still closed source (iprb(7d) and rtls(7d)). But there remain many others. And conversion of a driver to support Brussels is just the sort of bite-sized task that is great for learning how to develop in the kernel. Some possible drivers to convert are sfe(7d), rge(7d), and nge(7d). If you're interested in working on one of those, let me know (you need the hardware, though!)

Clearview/UV putback

Folks watching Nevada putbacks will have noticed at least 3 flag days in the past 24 hours. I want to take a second to talk about the first of them. (I'll talk about the second in a follow up post.)

The first, Clearview/UV, is about providing GLDv3-like features to legacy NIC drivers, and about providing friendlier names to device drivers. I will confess that I've not had a chance to play with any of these features yet, but I think that they are likely to be one of the more important putbacks to OpenSolaris this year. This putback fundamentally changes network administration by offering the ability to use "logical naming" for network device drivers.

The other important thing here is that some folks may believe that the Nemo Unification offered by Clearview/UV means that those legacy drivers don't need to be converted. This is not true. Conversion to GLDv3 still offers significant and tangible benefits to network device drivers:

1. Performance. The translation layer that Clearview provides adds a performance hit for legacy drivers. Its also the case that legacy NIC drivers are unable to benefit from several of the performance benefits that GLDv3 offered (direct function calls, mblk chaining, etc.)
2. Full VLAN support. Legacy drivers that don't support the undocumented VLAN features aren't able to offer full size VLAN frames. VLANs still work, but you have to shrink your MTU by 4 bytes.
3. Certain upcoming GLDv3/Crossbow features. Legacy drivers won't be able to take advantage of upcoming features in GLDv3 from Crossbow. These include various interrupt mitigation techniques and multiple hardware ring support.

The upshot is that the Nemo Unification represents a band-aid for legacy NIC drivers. If you own the code for one or more of these, you really should still have a plan for GLDv3 conversion, unless your willing to accept that your driver is a second class citizen in OpenSolaris. (Note that GLDv3 is still Consolidation Private. Figuring out that Corollary to that fact is left as an exercise to the readers.)

Folks that want help with such a conversion should contact me.