[OSUNIX-dev] Anyone going to OSDEVCON + news

["C. Bergström"]

Hi..

Who around here is going to OSDEVCON?

Thing's have been *very* quiet for months..  Apologies for that, but 
it's with great news I share a few updates..

1) CDDL + GPL + ISO legal problem is solved.  You can find the letter 
from the SFLC here
http://www.codestrom.com/wandering/2009/09/is-sun-violating-the-gpl.html

2) Both OSUNIX and Path64 were finally accepted to SPI

http://www.spi-inc.org/projects/osunix.html
http://www.spi-inc.org/projects/path64.html

Side note: While I never in a million years want to merge OSUNIX with 
Debian.  By spending the time and effort to clear the way we technically 
could help a sub-group of interested folks around here in making a 
Debian + OSUNIX sub project.

3) Fully open source progress

We've found people to help us with the compiler and libc, but blocked by 
ISO + installer

4) ZFS boot support in grub2

One of the main grub devs (phcoder) did all the hard work and now grub2 
builds and boots zfs.  yay!  They were even able to squeeze it down so 
it's small enough to fit inside the extra space on the disk for the MBR 
or something.  Anyway the result was that at the grub prompt you could 
read and (I believe write) to the zfs pools.  This will provide some 
great recovery tools for admins that ever get in trouble and don't have 
a livecd handy.

5) Open Group and running certain certification test suites..

Can't comment on this publicly until the agreement is signed, but if 
you're interested to help write and give feedback on next UNIX standard 
please email me off list.

6) Talks, research and future vision

I gave a talk to 14 bored people at University of Delaware recently. 
However, for those who actually got the big picture I think we have some 
excited new supporters.

I'm currently talking with Tsinghua and ICT in China about using OSUNIX 
as a research platform.

A lot of this is driven by the fact that OpenSolaris has better 
engineering and some awesome tools + performance.  OSUNIX as many people 
around here are already familiar with aims to significantly reduce the 
threshold for contributing.

7) New code review system

Patch queues are great for experimenting, code review and long running 
branches.  By using mercurial patch queues we can give anyone write 
access to the queue and let them commit freely without worrying about it 
going directly to hg tip.  This goes hand in hand with the review early 
and review off development practice we follow inside PathScale.  Each 
time a patch is committed to the queue it will be automatically inserted 
into our Google code review system at http://cr.pathscale.com . The code 
review is undergoing development and will have new features and bug 
fixes over the next week.  Your feedback is greatly appreciated.  
(Currently, we're only missing support for private repositories and 
private code review.  We realize some businesses and researchers must 
keep their work secret until it's ready for release.)

8) Smart package manager and python work

University of Delaware has someone interested to help us, but blocked by 
ISO and me detailing clearly what needs to be done.  The good news is 
the whoel thing works based on our current testing.  This may be old 
news for some, but pkgcore does build debs now and smart does handle 
them and resolve dependencies as expected.  It's a really novel way to 
combine ebuilds + binary packages in a seamless manner.

9) NetSyncro.com Inc. renamed to PathScale and sponsoring contributions

My company NetSyncro acquired the rights to PathScale and is now in a 
much more active role to push OSUNIX.  PathScale is a company developing 
a highly optimized HPC compiler.  With the combining of the two 
companies we're aiming to now provide a unified HPC solution built on 
OpenSolaris technology.  This will also include a fully open source 
compiler to build all of onnv-gate as well as support for NVIDIA CUDA 
and GPU accelerator technology.  GCC while still making lots of 
prorgress in terms of performance is still behind in some/most areas 
compared to PathScale.  This is early information and official 
announcements should be mid-November.

How this affects OSUNIX:

    a. PathScale compiler will soon be officially support on OSUNIX and 
OpenSolaris
    b. For Opteron based systems PathScale is one of the industries 
highest optimizing compilers and this is certainly true among free 
software.  Source code is available upon request until we resolve some 
copyright ownership issues.  We anticipate this will be around

10) ZFS dedup

PathScale may sponsor dedup development, but is looking for partners to 
help test and also fund the project.

As always you can find us on irc

#osunix irc.freenode.net or online at http://webchat.freenode.net

I'm sure I've missed some things, but that should be enough to catch 
people up and know the project is still quietly making progress.

Anyone who is in asia, europe or the US and is willing to speak or help 
out at a booth let me know.  We plan to increase our presence at open 
source and technology events and would need the help from volunteers to 
spread the word and success stories.


./Christopher