Status Update on the illumos Foundation

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.

New Advocate - Albert Lee

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, and again, congratulations and thank you to Albert.

New open source iprb(7D) driver

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.

zfs should not depend on python... and doesn't anymore

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.

Job Opp @ Nexenta: Director of Sustaining/Certifications

We're looking for a Director of Engineering, to own sustaining (aka bug fixing) and hardware platform certifications (where partners provide a hardware platform and ask us to certify it for use with NexentaStor.)

The job qualifications:

1. Must be local to the SF bay area (because the hardware lab is here)
2. Must have strong communication skills
3. Must be able to deal with stressful situations, and able to "manage" strong personalities
4. Must have Solaris/OpenSolaris expertise... hands-on kernel work (crash dump analysis, coding, etc.)
5. Desire experience with Storage protocols and products
6. Desire expertise with x86 hardware
7. Desire perl and/or python skills

To be clear, this will start out as a hands-on position, with a fast-paced startup environment. But the growth opportunities here are enormous. If you think you're up to this, please let me know.

New desktop image

Here's a sample of the new logo as a desktop image. I've not made this available publicly yet (mostly because I don't know how to capture this in a form that will include the gradient and post it where people can find it.) If someone with some gnome expertise on how to share this for others contacts me, I can work to make it available.

New illumos logo

Today at the OpenStorage Summit 2010, I unveiled the new illumos logo. We will be updating our branding, which also includes a new font, and other elements, over the next few weeks.

There were other updates on illumos that I covered in this talk. I think this was recorded, but I'm not sure right now where it was recorded and how to acces it. I'll be sure to share that when I find out.