[OSUNIX-dev] Anyone going to OSDEVCON + news

[Sriram Narayanan]

2009/10/21 "C. Bergström" <codestr0m at osunix.org>:
>
> Hi..
>
> Who around here is going to OSDEVCON?
>

Not me. I'm going to be busy with some user group activities now that
the conference season has begun in India.

> 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
>

Getting a clear go ahead is good news. However, this problem also
makes me wonder about how dumb we humans are... we may have common
goals, but will not see anything wrong with infighting.

> 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
>

The Belenix installer is there to use, as is the caiman installer.
Both the opensolaris distro as well as Belenix are using these without
problems.

Yes, Moinak and I have not often been able to make time to debug your
ISO images, but using the existing ISO creation scripts should help.

> 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.
>

Again, good news :) The real zfs awareness is in another stage loaded
in grub, btw, but overall, grub2 is now more zfs aware.

> 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.
>

I'll write to you offlist.

<snip/>

> 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.
>

Great for osunix. In the local developer community in Bangalore, we're
starting to showcase Belenix to some local Pythonists, who are also
interested in work with smart, KPackageKit and rpm5 (among other
things).

My only tip would be that the resulting packages and libraries should
be stable with the right form of linking happening.

> 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.

Congratulations. The applications in industrial automation, and other
related areas, should hopefully be profitable for Pathscale.

Best of luck, Codestr0m.

-- Sriram