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       1. March 2008

April 2006 OpenSolaris Community Newsletter

Overview

In April the OpenSolaris Community broke records for the most number of projects opened and also for total views to the Jive web discussion forums. Also, new contributions were offered in the form of code, documentation, and DTrace scripts. Community members attended conferences in three countries, and a half dozen user groups held meetings around the world. And on the program engineering side, a distributed source code management solution was chosen after a comprehensive open evaluation process. It was a full month, and industry observers are starting and speak out about the progress of the OpenSolaris community.

Quotes of the Month

"Sun's response was to invest in R&D while the market settled - and today they virtually own the high end Opteron market, have the first products from their next generation architecture in the market, and have established the world's fastest growing open source community around Solaris." --- Paul Murphy, ZDNet

"Solaris has attracted a vigorous developer community." --- Charles Babcock, InformationWeek

"They're pushing the envelope," Tony Iams, an analyst at Ideas International, said about Sun's aggressive research and development efforts for Solaris.

"I'm fairly positive on the prospects for Solaris," O'Grady wrote. "It's really made remarkable strides in a short period of time."

"The OpenSolaris community has been highly successful by all accounts … it is a direct conversation … between Sun and its customers and partners as they develop the next interesting architecture play." --- Stephen Walli.

"I think the move to OpenSolaris has been a good one. The move to open up their portfolio to Opteron and away from Sparc and moderate their investments there is a smart thing strategically." --- Bill Zeitler, IBM's systems/technology group.

Community Status

Projects & Communities

There were nine projects opened in April --- the most in a single month. The projects cover a range of technical subjects, and represent code, processes, and documentation.

• Tamarack: Removable Media Enhancements. Opened April 3rd. This project aims to improve user experience with removable media and hot-pluggable devices in Solaris.
• Sparks: Name Service Switch/nscd Enhancements. Opened April 4th. The Sparks project plans to make upward compatible changes to the name service switch and to nscd(1M) in order to deliver new functionality.
• FUSE (File system in User Space) on Solaris. Opened April 5th. This project will be porting the FreeBSD version of FUSE to Solaris.
• Chime Visualization Tool for DTrace. Opened April 13th. Chime is a graphical tool for visualizing DTrace aggregations and provides an alternative to similar CLI-based tools.
• Duckwater: Simplified Name Services Management. Opened April 13th. A major goal of this project is to improve the functionality of the LDAP NS backend to make it more approachable.
• Reno: Login Process Enhancements for Interop. Opened April 17th. This is a companion to the Sparks project and is related to interoperability with directories generally and Active Directory specifically.
• Muskoka. Opened April 19th. This project is an open repository for OpenSolaris technical Content.
• Companion Free and Open Source Software. Opened April 25th. The Companion project currently serves as a location to discuss compilation and distribution of externally derived open source software for OpenSolaris distributions.
• Winchester project (Schema mapping and ID mapping for AD Interoperability). Opened April 26th. This project will enable Solaris to operate in a native Active Directory environment.

Conferences

• LinuxWorld Expo, Prague

• Lukas Rovensky presented at LinuxExpo in Prague on April 10 about the activities of the CZOSUG. The presentation (in Czech) is accessible at the CZOSUG community page.

• OpenSolaris in Brazil

• In early April, Sun's Jonathan Schwartz met with the president of Brazil to talk about free and open source trends and the government's use of Solaris. Schwartz also met with some members of the OpenSolaris community in Brazil (images from Dimas Oliveira).
• Steve Lau attended FISL in Brazil April 19th and 20th. Energy and interest in OpenSolaris were high. Take a look at his photos, and read about his adventures: getting ready, first post, days 1 & 2, food at FISL, and chaos. Steve was also the first person to produce a DVD with the latest build and source for an event, which he used at FISL. This is a great step forward for making OpenSolaris approachable.

• MySQL Users Conference 2006, Santa Clara, California

• Ben Rockwood attended the MySQL conference representing the OpenSolaris community. See Ben's blog.

Contributions

• Code

• There were 3 code contributions put back into OpenSolaris via the request-sponsor program in April bringing the total for the year up to 50. Thanks to Jürgen Keil, Yann Poupet and Stephen Potter for the bug fixes. Also thanks to the Sun engineers for sponsoring the code through to putback: Anish Gupta, David Bustos and Valerie Bubb.
• You can see all the code contributors, their sponsors, and the bugs fixed in the code contributor report.

• Documentation

• 6 man page CRs were resolved in April due to community input. Thanks to Sun man page writers Peter Buch, Virginia Chapman, Pattie Levinson and Gary Parker for delivering these fixes. Thanks to community members Boyd Adamson, Chiaki Ishikawa, Theo Schlossnagle and Jonathan Wakely for their input.

• Scripts

• In late April, Brendan Gregg in Australia updated the latest build of The DTraceToolkit --- which is a collection of scripts developed by the DTrace community. This is yet another way developers around the world are contributing to to the OpenSolaris community. Currently, The DTraceToolkit contains104 scripts.

User Groups

• The Warangal OpenSolaris User Group met on April 9th, Frank Dimambro from Chelsio communications gave a presentation on "High performance DLPI drivers".
• The Czech OpenSolaris User Group (CZOSUG) met April 11th for two two presentations --- Lubos Kosco and Marin Man from the OP/N1 RPE team in Czech presented about Sun Grid Engine and gave a brief demonstration using four Ferraris. Frank Hofmann from OP/N1 RPE team UK presented about writing a file system driver for Solaris. Both presentations were recorded, and Frank's presentation is already available for public view. Also, here are some photos of the presentations.
• The FROSUG held a meeting on Thursday April 20th. Stuart Maybee presented Xen.
• The Sydney OpenSolaris User group (SOSUG) held its sixth meeting on April 26th with Brendan Gregg speaking about the upcoming Solaris Internals Book and Bill Moore and Jeff Bonwick presenting on ZFS. See Alan Hargreaves' blog for details and photos.
• The SVOSUG held a meeting on Thursday, April 27th. Steve Lau did a brief presentation about Source Code Management, and Bart Smaalders and Phil Hartman talked about performance.
• The Hyderabad OpenSolaris User Group (HOSUG) opened in India on April 27th. Subhash Thakur will be leading this group.

Distributions

• A new distribution became available this month: marTux-0.1. This is a LiveCD for SPARC (sun4u for now; sun4v later).
• SchilliX-0.5.2 became available on April 7th.
• Belenix 0.4.2 became available on April 9th.

Also Noteworthy

• Intel Mac and Solaris: Sun engineers Jan Setje-Eilers and Dan Price and OpenSolaris community member Jürgen Keil got Nevada to run on the new Intel iMac. Jürgen's bug fixes helped make this possible and should be integrated soon. Interest in running Solaris on these new machines is high. Jan's blog numbers went wild when he posted on April 13th, and there are two threads (here, here) on the OpenSolaris Jive forums that are getting a lot of attention, too.
• An implementation of Gentoo Portage for Opensolaris is underway, and the PowerPC port is making progress as well.
• Weekly News Updates: Glynn Foster continues to provide a valuable service for the OpenSolaris community by writing news summaries. For these snapshots, see: Weekly News #6: April 2, Weekly News #7: April 10, Weekly News #8: April 17th, Weekly News #9: April 23th.
• The OpenSolaris Community will be participating in the Google Summer of Code along with more than 100 other open source communities. We are currently collecting our project ideas, so stay tuned as this program unfolds over the summer.
• Jim Mauro provides an update on the The Second Edition of Solaris Internals.

Technical Status

SCM Work

• Interim reports about the three finalists (Bazaar, GIT and Mercurial) and final reports for GIT and Mercurial were posted on the SCM web page.
• Email about selection of a Distributed Source Code Management solution was sent on April 7th. Mercurial will be the Distributed SCM solution used on opensolaris.org.

Community and Website Statistics

Registrations and Discussions

• The last week of April brought a new record for total views to the 113 OpenSolaris Jive discussion forums of more than 131,000. That brings the total views to the forums to 3.2 million since the project opened last year.
• The total number of registered members passed 13,000 in April, and the rate of registrations remains fairly constant at around 120 members per week.
• Website and community stats are updated regularly here. Feedback is always welcome.

April's Newsletter Contributors

Editor: Linda Bernal
Contributors: Bonnie Corwin, Patrick Finch, Jim Grisanzio, Sridhar Muppalla, Lukas Rovensky
How to Contribute: The OpenSolaris Newsletter is a community effort, and all community members are welcome to participate. Simply send news items to program-team mail list or the opensolaris-discuss mail list. The editor will keep track of contributions and list the names of participants in each issue. Also, the editorial team is looking for feedback on the content and format of the newsletter, so please feel free to suggest changes.