Blogs

I just recently finished writing preliminary support for Linux to run as a guest under Sun LDOMs. This was the impetus behind my recent itch for virtualization issues.

First, I'd like to thanks Ashley Saulsbury, Narayan Venkat, Greg Onufer, and other engineers at Sun for helping me out. I'd also like to thank Fabio Massimo Di Netto for helping me put together early ramdisk userland and installer images. His tireless work and useful feedback allowed this to be brought up so quickly.

Things are in a bit of a rough state, but you can play around with installing a basic Linux guest with Solaris running the control node. There is a lot of missing functionality, and several major problems to resolve.

One of the running themes of Free/open source software has been how easily drivers for chipsets in old (and often not-so-old) hardware can be created. Some semiconductor vendors keep a tight hold on the details of their chips, and discourage F/OSS developers strongly. The recent news that Open Sound is available as Free software under both GPLv2 and CDDL is a great step forward, and the availability of drivers for R500-family AMD video cards is also fantastic.

As a long-term manufacturer of fantastic hardware, Sun is frequently approached by groups of developers looking for documentation for the chips used in its products. These days, Sun's newest chips are open source already, and there's a good web-site for documentation for current chips. This has already resulted in great things.

I think I'm starting to catch the virtualization bug. I find myself exchanging emails with Rusty about how virtualized device layers should be designed and that's a sure sign I'm beyond cure.

One topic we discussed recently is how to move data over virtual device paths. Flipping pages in the hypervisor, doing push and pull, has SMP issues on "traditional" systems.

On something like Niagara and anything horizontally scaled like that, it's much less of an issue. All the cores running guests and service nodes sit in front of the same L2 cache.

I'm so excited about today's launch. You can view the full launch online. The energy level at today's event in Washington D.C. couldn't be higher. Despite being three time zones ahead, I woke up before six a.m. and walked the mile and a half to the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center where we are holding the launch. For over two years I've worked with some of our largest customers in HPC and Web, with Andy Bechtolsheim and his design teams, and with the OpenSolaris community to get here. So here are some real-time notes from the amphitheater at the Ronald Reagan building.