Planet Solaris
July 02, 2009
I really should have posted this quite some time ago, but between getting the OpenSolaris 2009.06 release out, speaking at CommunityOne, speaking at the OpenSolaris user group in New York, and trying to sleep once in a while, it's been a little tough to keep up. Anyway,
Nick and I are giving a three-hour
OpenSolaris tutorial at
OSCON 2009 on July 21. Looking at the content draft, we've probably got more like five hours of material, but we'll figure out how to cram most of it in. Even if you've read
OpenSolaris Bible you're likely to learn a lot, as a fair amount of the material is on technology that's not covered in the book, such as
Crossbow and the
Automated Installer. I'm also expecting to spend some time wandering around at the conference, so hope to see you there!
July 01, 2009
Always the way, no sooner do I get round to finally upgrading to Netbeans v6.5.1, then out comes v6.7. Once I pluck up the energy to upgrade again, I'll write what the new features etc are like.
I just did a branch merge of the nfs41-gate with the onnv_117 tag of the onnv-gate.
And the closed tree had some changes.
I've added a tag of closedv11 to the nfs41-gate and you can download new versions
of the closed-bins at http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/nfsv41/downloads/
There are two ways you can go about installing pNFS on your machines:
- Get an install media for the base release (i.e., 117 in this case), install it, and then use the BFU (think precompiled kernel) and SUNWonbld supplied tarballs to install our pNFS image on top of the base. Details for doing that can be found at the bottom of http://wikis.sun.com/display/NFS/July+2008+Release+Notes
- Retrieve either a copy of our public Mercurial gate (ssh://anon@hg.opensolaris.org/hg/nfsv41/nfs41-gate) or the source tarball on the Downloads page. Follow the instructions at http://opensolaris.org/os/downloads/on/ on how to build ON. We've provided the source and the closed binaries, you supply the compile cycles.
June 30, 2009
Almost perfect!!
Wow, that was a really, really nice surprise! I do like all the new stuff from Solaris 10/OpenSolaris, and i say that in every opportunity, like now. I did write some posts about FMA, like this one… but one problem about the fmdump messages IMHO, was the fact that the messages on console were [...]
Ashwin Bhat and Angad Singh asked me for
one minute of my time outside the keynote hall at CommunityOne a few weeks ago. Hey, what's a minute, right? Happy to. But this minute was to be digitally recorded. Uha. Video. I generally shy away from such things because I`m shy about being interviewed. But these are really good guys and they`ve done great work as Campus Ambassadors in India, so I felt safe in front of their camera (though I`d clearly much rather be behind the camera). It wasn't too bad, though. But the 1 minute ran for 2 minutes and 21 seconds! Anyway. Thanks, guys. Great fun. Hope to get back to India sometime soon.
June 29, 2009
The Japan
OpenSolaris Community together on Saturday. Nice day (and night).
About 60 people came by for the three sessions, two of which were in
Japanese and the third in English. Then all three groups came together
for a nomikai. I think the model works well to start integrating the
Japanese and international OpenSolaris communities.
I used a new lens
for this event. My f/1.4 lens is getting fixed, so I borrowed Jon`s
50mm f/1.2, which is one scary smart lens. It`s a tad expensive, too,
so I was more than a little nervous shooting with it. Anyway, at f/1.2 the
focus is just razor thin. Focus on someone`s glasses and their entire face
is out. I messed up a few images that way, but by the end of the night
I was getting used to it. Amazing piece of glass. By the way, you can see Jon`s stuff
here. He`s one of the best photographers around.
I've been checking out the
Tokyo Hackerspace gmail list for a few weeks. Looks very interesting. The project grew out of some discussions at
BarCamp Tokyo
a couple of months ago, and I spoke to
Karamoon about it at the OpenSolaris community event this weekend. In a world of ever expanding global digital communities, it
seems like a nice idea to have a very local a very physical space to
hang out in and hack on things that need hacking. Global and digital are
fine, but local and physical are needed too.
For info, check it out on the wiki.
This morning
Bonnie posted
two
documents supporting the Phase 1 website transition plans:
- The plan to implement the governance and website roles and
collectives, and
- The data migration strategy outlining how data will be migrated
from existing databases into the new Auth database.
Bonnie and Alan drafted the documents and all three of us iterated for
a couple of weeks as they went through multiple drafts. It`s
amazing experiencing the distinction between writing a document that
articulates some issue in theory and writing a document that
articulates a specific implementation that has to actually work. It`s
the distinction between night and day. Ideas are fine, but if you don`t
build them they are not real. That lesson is learned.
Also, I appreciate more than ever the process I went
through in the recent past attempting to re-write the OpenSolaris Constitution. Building
and describing the new site would have been
so much easier had that
Constitution been approved in March.
But it wasn`t. That`s life I suppose. So,
now we have to implement the old Constitution while also accounting for
things that document doesn`t even mention because it came about after
the original site was designed. Not to mention all the odd stuff that evolved (and broke) on the current site -- all of which has to be migrated to the new site. As a result, in August we will have
some things covered under Governance and some things covered under
generally accepted practice -- and that last bit was really the basis
of the concept we were trying to move toward with the proposed
Constitution. Hopefully, the OGB will at some point this year take up that
proposed Constitution again, get it updated, and get it approved so our
Governance documents reflect the reality of how the community operates in real life.
Anyway, until that happens we will continue building what we have to
build, and it will be good to finally break with the past of the old site. So, it`s important for anyone with an account on opensolaris.org
to review these new documents and the other information we have posted
in the Website community recently to be prepared for the changes coming
in July and August. All users on the site will be affected by this
multi-phase transition (hopefully in a good way, of course). More
documents will be posted in the coming weeks on website feature
mappings, Auth transition instructions, and content migration plans.
And that`s just Phase 1 and Phase 2. There will be a Phase 3 that will
take us well into the fall.
Website Transition
Documentation |
Auth System Beta |
XWiki
Website Beta |
Program Roadmap
"I hope that after some time we'll see OpenSolaris powered PDAs." --
Alexander Eremin
We decided to skip branch merges to Nevada builds 113-116. We had issues with the hardware in the lab and vboxes. Plus we wanted a stable environment for the BakeAThon. I'm having a hard time merging with build 117. One of the issues was a panic on the client (which I could patch) due to getting NFS4ERR_BADSESSION from a DS. I was able to see the DS replying on the exchange_id request in a packet trace. There are only a handful of places where the server returns this error code, so I was pretty sure I could reuse a Dtrace script I had laying around:
:nfssrv:mds_lease_chk:return
/args[1] != 0/
{
printf("rc1 = %d", args[1]);
}
Until I came along this code snippet:
*cs->statusp = resp->dsr_status =
NFS4ERR_UNSAFE_COMPOUND;
goto final;
...
final:
DTRACE_NFSV4_2(op__destroy__session__done,
struct compound_state *, cs,
DESTROY_SESSION4res *, resp);
}
Just great, no return value. How could I catch it?
Well, the answer is staring us right in the face, we can use op__destroy__session__done.
I had to snoop around for examples in a colleague's home directory (which is kinda why I blog
about this stuff, it is easier to find), but ended up with this:
:::op-bind-conn-to-session-done
{
bresp = (BIND_CONN_TO_SESSION4res *)arg1;
printf("rc1 = %d", bresp->bctsr_status);
}
:::op-destroy-session-done
{
dresp = (DESTROY_SESSION4res *)arg1;
printf("rc1 = %d", dresp->dsr_status);
}
Note that I wasn't too worried about being specific as to which module you found these calls
in, I was betting on them being very unique.
Oh, and I was able to narrow down where the NFS4ERR_BADSESSION was coming from. And then I had
to add debug statements to find out why. :-< I bet I might have been able to do it still with
Dtrace. :->
June 28, 2009
Four members of the Japan OpenSolaris Community wrote a book on ZFS
recently. It`s coming out in July, and it`s specifically for the
Japanese market. The cover has not been selected yet, but here are the
early details: ZFS 仮想化されたファイルシステムの徹底活用 (大型本) by Hisayoshi Kato, Michitoshi Sato, Nagahara Niroharu, and Imai Satoshi. This is quite a significant contribution to the community in Japan because it`s important to have technical content written by Japanese engineers for Japanese engineers. Translating English content from the west good, of course, but the generation of original content in Japanese also needs to be part of this community`s growth plans.
Here are some more books on OpenSolaris: http://blogs.sun.com/jimgris/tags/book
June 27, 2009
It's excellent to see the
9th Annual Linux Kernel Summit and the
1st Annual Japan Linux Symposium
coming to Tokyo in October. Check out this language from the LF
website: "The Japan Linux Symposium will be the showcase Japan and Asia
Pacific conference for The Linux Foundation."
Showcase. This is
significant. The Japanese may not shout about it much, but developers
in this country are contributing to FOSS and their contributions are
growing. The potential in Japan for open source is huge. I've been
saying it since I got here. So cool that the LF clearly recognizes this
potential by bringing their conferences here. Also interesting: the LF website appears in two languages -- English and Japanese.
I already hang out with the Tokyo Linux User Group (
here,
here), so I hope to attend this gig in October.
Nothing like going right to the
very top, eh? My goodness. Here's the
OpenSolaris community in Brazil at
FISL hanging out with
Brazil's President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
I think this sets a new standard in government relations for the entire
OpenSolaris community, don't you think? So, each one of us around the
world now has to go out and shoot some images (video is fine, too) of
our country's leader standing with our respective communities all
dressed up in OpenSolaris stuff. Ok. Should be easy enough. Just send
your images to
osug-leaders or advocacy-discuss, and we'll collect them there.
Absolutely. Outrageous.
June 26, 2009
Congratulations to Vitório Sassi and all OSOL users from OpenSolaris-BR (special to PoaOSUG ;-) that are doing a great work at FISL 10!
I just updated to OpenSolaris development build 117. Easy.
Go get it here.
June 25, 2009
I love these six videos of
street photographers walking around shooting images in New York City. My fav is Sandra, who said, "Wow, this is what a father looks like when no one`s looking." She photographs day laborers. She gets that trust takes time.
A Workers’ Paradise Found Off Japan’s Coast: “Mr. Fujimoto said he would resign immediately if a serious rival appeared in an election. `That would be a sign the village has lost confidence in me,` he said.” -- New York Times
Interesting. I really must visit this place.
The Solaris Basic Audit & Reporting Tool, bart, is a great little alternative to Tripwire or AIDE. While not nearly so robust or full featured, it does what you need it to do with very little impact. The sqlite of intrusion detection systems, if you will. I blogged about BART in 2005 and so far its still only got 1 real comment, which was simply mentioning AIDE as an alternative. No love.
Given that BART is awesome and no one seems to embrace it due to, perhaps, perceptions of complexity that are unfounded, I sought to implement a simple solution to bring BART to the masses. I call it bartlog
Quite simply, bartlog is a BASH wrapper around BART and logger which is run from cron on any schedule you like and reports any changes to syslog. Setup is simple, download bartlog and copy into /usr/sbin or whereever you prefer, then download bart.rules and copy into /etc. Now run bartlog from cron every hour or day or whatever you like.
The script is simple and intended to be tweeked, modified and made as l337 as you like. What it does is creates a BART manifest (record of files and MD5 checksums) for those directory structures specified in the bart.rules file. The first time it runs it just creates a manifest and exits. The second time you run it it creates a new manifest and then compares it against the previously created one. If it doesn't find any changes it just replaces the old manifest with the new one, this avoids you getting repetitiously alerted. However, if it does find a change it sends the change to syslog, so that its stored with your normal logs viewed either by running dmesg or reading /var/adm/messages. By default I'm using the syslog audit.err priority because by default Solaris sends those messages to /var/adm/messages, however if you are deploying this in a production environment I'd recommend using audit.warn instead and then modifying /etc/syslog.conf to send those warnings to a secure centralized syslog server. If you complete the solution with Splunk you could have a centralized, searchable log of all changes to critical files on which you could report, respond or alert on.
I use a one hour interval on my home workstation. Here's my syslog following a new user addition:
root@quadra ~$ dmesg
...
Jun 25 11:01:58 quadra root: [ID 702911 audit.error] BART Reports Change: /etc/.pwd.lock mtime 4a218d04 4a43b0bd
Jun 25 11:01:58 quadra root: [ID 702911 audit.error] BART Reports Change: /etc/opasswd size 968 985 mtime 49fa4236 4a218d2b contents fc27c5b28b3a248b6c6129aa9aed7329 2200107fc7128d5cd38de333bea4500f
Jun 25 11:01:58 quadra root: [ID 702911 audit.error] BART Reports Change: /etc/ouser_attr mtime 4a04a741 4a218d01
Jun 25 11:01:58 quadra root: [ID 702911 audit.error] BART Reports Change: /etc/passwd size 985 1022 mtime 4a218d2b 4a43b0ac contents 2200107fc7128d5cd38de333bea4500f 640da69537a35046571b4fda1def10d1
Jun 25 11:01:58 quadra root: [ID 702911 audit.error] BART Reports Change: /etc/shadow size 708 783 mtime 4a218d04 4a43b0bd contents f83158dffddc124dab2f22a979338695 6ba7d42600da8d4fc9b8a92f4bf0afe7
Jun 25 11:01:58 quadra root: [ID 702911 audit.error] BART Reports Change: /etc/user_attr mtime 4a218d01 4a43b0ac
So I hope this fills the hole. Anyone running a Solaris system at home can download these two files, add to cron and be off and running. No hassle, no maintenance. All the love, none of the pain. If your running a system where bart isn't installed, just install SUNWbart from IPS or the install media.
Solaris Express Community Edition (aka Nevada) build 117 has been
released.
Significant changes in this build:
1. Solaris Simnet
PSARC/2009/200 simulated networks
2. zpool autoexpand property -
PSARC/2008/3533. Areca 7.1 backup suite integrated
4. NVIDIA graphics driver updated to 185.18.14
5. Wireshark updated to version 1.0.8
6. Conman 0.2.4.1 console management tool integrated
Changes on package level:
New packages:
system SUNWareca Areca backup utilities
system SUNWconmanr ConMan - Console Management tool (root)
system SUNWconmanu ConMan - Console Management tool (usr)
system SUNWperl-net-ssleay Net::SSLeay- Perl extension for using OpenSSL
system SUNWxsun-headers X Window System: Xsun server SDK headers
June 24, 2009
Today i was invited to the HP LeftHand Event here @SP. It’s always nice to see and hear about news on the Storage world, and i really like HP hardware. I do remember the first Windows Servers i did manage, all running on HP hardware, ECC memories… old times. No hardware problems, and a lot [...]
At last, there is a Solaris blog aggregator -
Planet Solaris the perfect place
to feast on all things Solaris from such luminaries as
Casper Dik,
Jeff Bonwick and other
Sun employees and of course, the non-Sun-rabble such as
Rich Teer,
Ben Rockwood. I'd add
"and me" if I'd done any meaningful Solaris blogging yet...
Author: Darren Moffat
Repository: /export/onnv-gate
Total changesets: 1
Changeset: acbef346fd18
Comments:
PSARC/2008/403 libc printf behaviour for NULL string
6724478 libc printf should not SEGV when passed NULL for %s format
Files:
modified:
usr/src/lib/libc/port/print/doprnt.c
Finally got this in.
I went to the Tokyo launch of OpenSolaris 2009.06 at Sun's office in
Jingumae earlier tonight. Good turn out of about 100 people. The
lineup: Introduction, Akira Ohsone; OpenSolaris 2009.06, Shunsuke
Kuroda; OpenSolaris Demo, Shoji Haraguchi; Solaris 10 5/09, Hiroaki
Nozaki; and CommunityOne West Report, Masafumi Ohta. See videos here from Shoji. This is the third
such launch of OpenSolaris in Tokyo. Both the 2008.05 and 2008.11
events were excellent as well. Tonight seemed to be an interesting mix
of Sun Solaris 10 customers and the growing OpenSolaris communities in
Tokyo. There was also some chatter on #opensolaris-jp on IRC.
Nice night.
June 23, 2009
I've been struggling to get my webcam to work with my
Apple Powerbook. I would have thought it had enough performance - Nvidia
graphics, fast ethernet, 867 Mhz PowerPC G4 etc etc. For some reason it
just can't show the full-size streaming video.
Running the same feed into my Sun Blade 1000 with Solaris 10 and I get a
rock-solid 640x480 video feed in my browser.
Both laptop and workstation are plumbed into a switch, which the webcam is
also connected to. The Sun machine just hooks up and works. The Apple
simply struggles. I've tried using a direct cable (crossover, and
non-crossover) into the laptop. I tried fiddling with the ethernet
parameters.
Maybe it's because the workstation has 2 cpus, or something to do with
hardware, but it could just be Solaris 10 kicks ass.
Communicating is all about building relationships, and that`s always a
two way street (or if you are in the community business, a multi-way
street). Every wonder what a rapid fire relationship with Rahm is like. Check out
Ring,
ring, it's Rahm:
NBC’s Chuck Todd calls the Emanuel relationship
“no-nonsense.”
“He’s always trying to extract as much information as he’s trying to
give,” Todd says.
But the conversations with Emanuel “can be as little as 30 seconds,”
Paul Begala, the CNN commentator and longtime Emanuel friend says. “He
calls, drops a few F-bombs, makes his point and hangs up.”
The shock value of his delivery is interesting (he can do that because
he`s powerful),
but even more important is the bit about the information extraction.
Information has to flow both ways to demonstrate the value of the
relationship.
Seems like everyone's doing it, so I thought I'd do it too.
I am a member of the Open Solaris pilot program, which is a
precursor to the full public launch of Solaris as an open source
project.
I'm a big fan of all things Unix, having used various Solaris,
Linux and Mac OS X systems over the years. I have a particular
fondness for Solaris having been working with it for about 10 years
now, mostly in the area of GUI programming. Currently I work for a
financial data firm in Manhattan.
I was a technical reviewer of "Solaris Systems Programming" by Rich
Teer which was just published this year. See here for Rich's home page
and a link to buy the book.
The choices were to watch "CSI" about a flight attendant brutally stabbed
to death in a hotel room, or fit my DDS3 drive and get my workstation
backed up.
It's obvious, right? I fitted the tape drive. It actually took about 10-15
minutes of real work, plus 1/2 hour searching for a power cable extender
(you know, those internal power cables with molex connectors? I have a
bunch of extenders somewhere). I never found the extender, so I snipped a
cable tidy holding back the existing one inside the box and got the tape
drive fully hooked up.
I think a SB1000 looks very nice with a DVD-ROM and a tape drive. Sure it
would be even better to have a DDS4 or DAT 74 or whatever the latest kind
is, but they cost about 5X more!
As I write this, I'm doing a level0 backup of the entire machine to
tape. Quick, are there files at risk where you (yes, YOU!) live? :)
To get things kicked off, I'm using hostdump.sh which
takes 2 minutes to download install and works out what to dump all by
itself.
Yes, I know that real men write their own scripts, using star, fancy block
sizes, FIFO buffers etc, but I've always thought it better to start with
protecting the data, then work on the sophistication and efficiency of
the backup system strictly in that order.
I need to rationalise my SPARC machines, so where better to start than
with an inventory? I need to see if I can get rid of some of these,
because we have to move house soon, and right now we have a big
basement. I can't count on having that much room going forward.
- Ultra 10 "arwen" 333mhz, 512MB RAM two IDE hard disks (4 and 12GB I
think), Elite3D-M3 graphics. One of the disks sometimes makes worrying
noises. Running Solaris 10. Rarely switched on.
I used this for several years as my daily Sun workstation at home. I
implemented my first OpenGL component on this machine, which eventually
got ported to Windows, and with massive further development can be seen
from the Bloomberg function "OVDV" (click on "3d graph").
I find that raw compute performance of the Ultra 10 machine is not bad
- that's a 2MB cache cpu. Also graphics are quite good with the Elite
card. Not as snappy at 2D as a Creator card, or certainly modern PC
cards. I/O performance just BLOWS, however, with the default hard disk
and cd-rom.
This machine came with a near-identical "twin" off ebay (same auction)
that I set up for a friend - Solaris 8, forte 6.2, 13w3 adapter, the
lot. I took it to the Mailboxes shop nearby and shipped it to London for
him. Phew, that was heavy! He paid me back in full. Sadly, he never even
unpacked it. That other machine is called "feanor"...
- SPARC20 quad 125MHz HyperSPARC. 384MB RAM, 9GB hard disk, 8MB VSIMM,
SX graphics. Running Solaris 9, never switched on.
This was a "trophy" machine really. I spent way too much buying this
little charmer off Ebay. I had a SPARC20 at Goldman Sachs when I used to
work there, so this does have some nostalgia value. I used it as a
jumpstart server for a while, but it's really quite slow, and it puts off
a lot of heat and sometimes a whiff of hot metal smell, and is also
noisy. I have some photos of when it arrived here. The
"console funnies" were amusing (odd graphics effects when it switches from
X11 back to OBP prompt).
- Ultra 2 dual 300 "faramir" 1GB ram, dual 9GB 10k rpm SCSI disks,
Creator 3d graphics, SBUS QFE card. Running Solaris 10 build 55.
My current jumpstart server. Performs very well, and does not put off too
much heat (at least with the unscientific "put hand near air vent"
test). I put a SCSI DVD-ROM in it. Works fine.
This was also my first Solaris 10 machine. I attempted to do something
interesting with zones and multiple NICs with this card, but I ran across
a bug in the then-current version of Solaris 10 and gave up for the time
being. I need to get back to that idea (future blog ahoy).
- Ultra 2 dual 200 mhz. A $50 bet on ebay. Had a bad hard disk, 256MB
ram, Creator graphics. Not bad but I'd hoped I'd get lucky and get 300mhz
cpus (see below). I don't use it because these cpus DO put off a lot of
heat (these are the fastest of older generation SPARC - older, hotter
silicon). I did have some fun putting in some older hard disks and
installing solaris 9 on it. Solaris 10 will not work (UltraSPARC-1 cpus
are no longer supported). I bought some 300mhz cpus for it, but they don't
work (the motherboard isn't sufficiently new to support them). So I bought
a 300mhz motherboard for it too, but that arrived slightly damaged, at
this point I got a bit discouraged with the damn thing. So there may be a
project in here for some very rainy day.
- AXi 440mhz "cirdan", 1GB RAM, 18GB 10k rpm SCSI disk. black generic
steel rackmount case. No media drive at all.
This was fun for a while. It has no graphics so I had to hook up the
serial console to a serial port on my Ultra 10. Getting Solaris 8 to
install on this was "interesting". It couldn't bring up its NIC when it
booted off disk whatsoever. Someone had done a reinstall of Solaris 2.6
(IIRC) and been naughty and not tested it, clearly they'd missed some
required stuff. Anyway, I put in a SunSwift card I happened to have
(NIC+SCSI) and it -nearly- got on the network (the link went up and down
once and then stayed down). However when I broke into OBP and then
continued, it finally worked it out. The official solution was to use the
platform CD ... which of course one tends not to get with Ebay
purchases. There is some bug with CPU speeds over a certain level (227 mhz
maybe?)and that version of Solaris. Anyway once I managed to get it on the
network, I net booted Solaris 8 and it was fine. Performance is good, but
rackmount cases have obnoxiously loud fans. I planned to gut it and
rebuild into a quiet case but never got around to it.
- AXi 440 mhz "starbox" cd-rom, RAID controller, DDS3 tape drive,
floppy, giant black steel case, many many fans.
I used this for several months. I had to fit some SCA-II SCSI disks to it
as it came stripped. The RAID controller has an LCD screen and also a
serial port. There was a quad Zynix NIC in it which didn't seem to work,
and the built-in NIC was also flaky. Currently it has my SunSwift card in
it. I also used a spare Creator3D UPA card in it for a while. Once again
the dreaded noise aspect limits the fun. I plan to rip out the good stuff
and use it in the AXi rebuild project.
- AXi 333Mhz -another black generic job. I forget the specs, I'm not
even sure why I bought this one. Too much Ebay trawling - a "bargain" is
not such great value if you don't need it. It did come with another DDS
type drive, but it's much older - not worth using.
- Add finally ... Sun Blade 1000 dual 750 mhz UltraSPARC-III, 2GB RAM,
dual 36GB FCAL disks, dual Creator3D graphics, brand new (replacement)
DVD-ROM.
This is what I have at work. It's a very nice machine. Built like a
tank. Good performance. Firewire, USB, Fiber Channel, SCSI. Fairly quiet,
PCI environment monitoring built-in - it's really a "proper server" in a
workstation case - the E280R has exactly the same motherboard. The CPUs
come on daughter boards which have to be carefully fitted and then
tightened into place using a (provided) torque wrench. Complete beast to
move around.
This machine can put off a tremendous amount of heat when it runs flat
out, but it also has clock speed switching to limit power dissipation
under low load, so it's still Energy Star qualified.
Prices on these machines finally dropped recently. Firstly there is now
a steady supply of newer Sun Blade 1500, 2000 and 2500 workstations on
Ebay which limit how much the older machine can go for. The 1500 and 2500
have a much more suitable workstation processor, the UltraSPARC-IIIi,
however they are still relatively new and costly. I have a 2500 at work
also, it kicks ass, but overall it's not quite as special as the 1000. The
SB2000 might be good too, but I find it doesn't look as nice for some
reason.
The SB1000, after all, has the unique illuminated Sun logo - you should
be able to make it out here.
This is my Solaris 10 desktop machine. If I do any more home-based
Solaris development, this is where I'll do it.
I'm going to finish with the output of one of my favourite commands on
SPARC/Solaris. The prtdiag command has special knowledge of the hardware
of the machine that is running it, as long as it's called via the correct,
hardware dependent path under /var/platform. This includes hardware
details such as number, type, cache size of the cpus, graphics cards, bus
adapters etc - even CPU temperature. One thing that disappointed me with
recent changes in Solaris is this command stopped printing precise
temperatures, because it was giving customers too much to think about, and
instead only prints "okay" if the temps are within the acceptable ranges.
One of the things that Open
Solaris will allow is "fixing" issues like this - I will be able to
have my own version of this command, for example.
I hope that when Sun does full-strength AMD based server designs,
this kind of valuable utility will be supported (and similar monitoring
hardware will be provided) on the x86 side of the reservation.
Note : one doesn't even have to muck about with switch statements to work out
which machine scripts are, just use uname - see the following :-
bash-3.00$ /usr/platform/`uname -i`/sbin/prtdiag -v
System Configuration: Sun Microsystems sun4u SUNW,Sun-Blade-1000 (2 X UltraSPARC-III)
System clock frequency: 150 MHZ
Memory size: 2GB
==================================== CPUs ====================================
E$ CPU CPU
CPU Freq Size Implementation Mask Status Location
--- -------- ---------- ------------------- ----- ------ --------
0 750 MHz 8MB SUNW,UltraSPARC-III 5.4 on-line +-board/cpu0
1 750 MHz 8MB SUNW,UltraSPARC-III 5.14 on-line +-board/cpu1
================================= IO Devices =================================
Bus Freq Slot + Name +
Type MHz Status Path Model
---- ---- ---------- ---------------------------- --------------------
pci 33 +s/system-board ebus/ns87317-ecpp (parallel)
okay /pci@8,700000/ebus@5/parallel
pci 33 +s/system-board ebus/se (serial)
okay /pci@8,700000/ebus@5/serial
pci 33 +s/system-board pci108e,1101 (network) SUNW,pci-eri
okay /pci@8,700000/network@5,1
pci 33 +s/system-board pciclass,0c0010 (firewire)
okay /pci@8,700000/firewire@5,2
pci 33 +s/system-board scsi-pci1000,f (scsi-2)
okay /pci@8,700000/scsi
pci 33 +s/system-board scsi-pci1000,f (scsi-2)
okay /pci@8,700000/scsi
pci 66 +s/system-board SUNW,qlc-pci1077,2200 (scsi-+
okay /pci@8,600000/SUNW,qlc@4
upa 120 +em-board/J4501 SUNW,ffb (display) SUNW,501-4788
okay /upa@8,480000/SUNW,ffb@0,0
upa 120 +em-board/J3501 SUNW,ffb (display) SUNW,501-4788
okay /upa@8,480000/SUNW,ffb@1,0
============================ Memory Configuration ============================
Segment Table:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Base Address Size Interleave Factor Contains
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
0x0 2GB 4 BankIDs 0,1,2,3
Bank Table:
-----------------------------------------------------------
Physical Location
ID ControllerID GroupID Size Interleave Way
-----------------------------------------------------------
0 0 0 512MB 0
1 0 1 512MB 1
2 0 0 512MB 2
3 0 1 512MB 3
Memory Module Groups:
--------------------------------------------------
ControllerID GroupID Labels Status
--------------------------------------------------
0 0 chassis/system-board/J0100
0 0 chassis/system-board/J0202
0 0 chassis/system-board/J0304
0 0 chassis/system-board/J0406
0 1 chassis/system-board/J0101
0 1 chassis/system-board/J0203
0 1 chassis/system-board/J0305
0 1 chassis/system-board/J0407
=============================== usb Devices ===============================
Name Port#
------------ -----
keyboard 3
mouse 4
============================ Environmental Status ============================
Fan Status:
---------------------------------------
Location Sensor Status
---------------------------------------
+stem-fan-slot system-fan okay
+/cpu-fan-slot cpu-fan okay
+r-supply-slot power-supply okay
---------------------------------------
Temperature sensors:
------------------------------------
Location Sensor Status
------------------------------------
+em-board/cpu0 Die okay
+em-board/cpu0 Ambient okay
+em-board/cpu1 Die okay
+em-board/cpu1 Ambient okay
================================ HW Revisions ================================
ASIC Revisions:
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Path Device Status Revision
-------------------------------------------------------------------
/pci@8,700000 pci108e,8001 okay 5
/pci@8,600000 pci108e,8001 okay 5
/pci@8,700000/ebus@5 ebus okay 1
System PROM revisions:
----------------------
OBP 4.5.10 2002/02/11 10:38
POST 4.5.9 2002/02/05 21:25
bash-3.00$
June 22, 2009
So we had our first BakeAThon hosted by NetApp. I thought it went very well and
it enabled the NetApp folks to see how much work goes into hosting the event.
I can't go into details that involves other vendors, because of a NDA, but I can say that we did a lot of testing
on new features in both the client and the server. I'm not that familiar with the
client side changes, I think we had the compound constructor changes by Bob Mastors
and Karen Rochford was testing a rewrite of the layout handling code.
I was more excited about the changes on the server side:
- Rob Thurlow had added
Proxy I/O, which allows a nfsv4.1 client to talk to our pNFS client. I.e., you
get the sessions code, but not the 'p' -- it isn't parallel. We had tested this
internally, but hadn't had a chance to see how other clients fared.
- Jim Wahlig had made some significant changes to how the server does layout
recalls and also put in the first pass at persistent layouts.
- Piyush Shivam had added a heartbeat between the DS and the MDS. This allowed
the DS to detect that the MDS had rebooted and to re-register with it. If the
DS reboots itself, it would automatically handle this condition.
- Lisa Week had implemented the Control Protocol logic for DS_REMOVE. This
feature allows a MDS to remove files from a DS.
- Rick Mesta was testing general sessions code changes, including the
sa_cachethis implementation.
- Jeff Smith had some code cleanup in place to reorganize our kmod
footprint. This was the first of two changes and was the most innocent.
- I had cleaned up the DS_REPORTAVAIL logic and general race cases for when
a DS was rebooting whilst under load from the client.
- Plenty of bug fixes and other minor improvements.
I also brought a major rewrite of the layout handling code (allowing for multiple
layouts, etc), device handling (allowing multiple datasets on the same DS) and the integration
of the kspe (kernel simple policy engine), but I probably needed another week
of development/testing on that code.
The other major development is that we are finally making the switch to
using Virtual Boxes for our testing
needs. We typically would want 3-4 machines per developer. We can refine this by
having a pair of public communities (MDS plus 2 DSes). One as the stable
system and the other as a sanity test rig. And then each client developer gets
their own machine for a client and each server developer gets a community.
Well, with Virtual Boxes working on
a wide range of host OSes, we can have the communities hosted on one or two
beefier machines, perhaps sharing room with the build server, and each developer
can bring up what they need on their laptops.
I'm going to be giving a presentation on July 7th over pNFS at the
Oklahoma City OpenSolaris User Group - OKCOSUG. I'd like to give a live demo
using virtual boxes, but I'm not making any promises...
Recently I participated in
OpenSolaris Apps of Steel Challenge and I won a laptop!
My Toshiba
Portégé® R600 arrived this morning and it comes pre-installed with Open Solaris. First impressions are really good - it is so light.
It is a fortunate coincidence that I'm on a short holiday right now as I will have more time to play with it :) Already doing an upgrade.
Thank you Sun you've made my day!
Tried to upgrade my workstation over the weekend to snv_117. Apart from a little tridying up I had to do as a package didn't install correctly, all apeared to be going fine. I then went to unmount /.alt.snv_117, and it failed saying that the filesystem was busy.
fuser -c showed no processes using the mount point. What could it be?
A little bit of dtracing the umount2() system call was illuminating.
1 <- zfsctl_umount_snapshots 0 0
1 <- zfs_umount 0 16
Hang on, snapshots? Although it returned 0, let's just check; as I do have timeslider enabled on this box.
rootksh@vesvi:~$ zfs list -t snapshot|grep 117
pool/ROOT/snv_116@snv_117 4.03M - 8.78G -
pool/ROOT/snv_117@zfs-auto-snap:hourly-2009-06-19-09:00 43.8M - 7.99G -
pool/ROOT/snv_117@zfs-auto-snap:hourly-2009-06-19-10:00 48.9M - 8.44G -
pool/ROOT/snv_117@zfs-auto-snap:hourly-2009-06-19-11:00 43.7M - 8.74G -
pool/ROOT/snv_117@zfs-auto-snap:frequent-2009-06-19-11:15 42.6M - 8.75G -
pool/ROOT/snv_117@zfs-auto-snap:frequent-2009-06-19-11:30 45.8M - 8.76G -
pool/ROOT/snv_117@zfs-auto-snap:frequent-2009-06-19-11:45 38.1M - 8.77G -
pool/ROOT/snv_117@zfs-auto-snap:hourly-2009-06-19-12:00 38.5M - 8.80G -
pool/ROOT/snv_117@zfs-auto-snap:daily-2009-06-22-00:00 0 - 8.80G -
pool/ROOT/snv_117@zfs-auto-snap:weekly-2009-06-22-00:00 0 - 8.80G -
pool/ROOT/snv_117@zfs-auto-snap:hourly-2009-06-22-10:00 0 - 8.80G -
pool/ROOT/snv_117@zfs-auto-snap:frequent-2009-06-22-10:30 0 - 8.80G -
pool/ROOT/snv_117@zfs-auto-snap:frequent-2009-06-22-10:45 0 - 8.80G -
Oh, timeslider was taking snapshots of the filesystem while it was upgrading. Hmm maybe we should be having that disabled on the target of a live upgrade (rfe coming, but I don't hold out a lot of hope).
Anyway, removing them was not difficult:
rootksh@vesvi:~$ zfs list -t snapshot|grep snv_117@zfs-auto|awk '{print $1}' | xargs -L 1 zfs destroy
rootksh@vesvi:~$ luumount snv_117
rootksh@vesvi:~$
Something to keep in mind if you are using timeslider, zfs root and live upgrade (I wonder if we would have the same issue with 'pkg image-update' in OpenSolaris).
June 21, 2009
Happy Father day to all the Fathers out there. Have a great day.
When I was in San Francisco a few weeks ago, I picked
The
48 Laws of Power and The 33 Strategies of War by Robert Greene. If
you love history and the study of how things really get done, check
these books out. I can`t put them down. I can see how Greene`s stuff
would come handy while defending yourself against the packs of wild dogs running
around out there. Some very nice tips in these books.
Greene seems like an
interesting character, too. Study hard. I am.
June 20, 2009
I love this. An excavating contractor has five or six heavy backhoes on this site ripping apart an old concrete building. And they are painted a lovely shade of pink with white polka dots. How`s that for business development for an industry not used to such style, eh? I was on a bus driving by the other day and had my little camera, so I really couldn`t get a good shot, but you get the idea. This is a contractor with an attitude, no question about it. And in Japan, too. Wild. I`d like to meet him. Or perhaps her?
June 19, 2009
We disabled process core dumps on one of our environments but still we want to know when it happens along with some more information on the even.
root@ dtrace -q -n fbt:genunix:core:entry \
'{printf("%Y exec: %s args: %s cwd: %s pid: %d zone: %s signal: %d\n", \
walltimestamp, curpsinfo->pr_fname, curpsinfo->pr_psargs, cwd, pid, \
zonename, arg0);}' >/local/tmp/process_cores.log
Now lets try to kill a process so it tries to dump a core:
root@ bash -x
root@ kill -SIGBUS $$
+ kill -SIGBUS 14054
Bus Error (core dumped)
root@
root@ tail -1 /local/tmp/process_cores.log
2009 Jun 19 16:07:54 exec: bash args: bash -x cwd: /home/milek pid: 14054 zone: global signal: 10
root@
The overhead of running the script is practically none unless you're trying to dump as many core dumps as possible per second and even then the overhead should be relatively small :)
its hard to sleep when there is this many bright colors on the weather map, and they are expecting hail.
those in california aren't used to seeing this many colors on the radar map all the colors are usually associated with loud noise from thunder, lightning, and possibly hail, which is expected in the next few minutes.
June 18, 2009
Just read this really interesting blog entry about an
interesting number he recived in an email.
Its really cool. Check it out.
Cognitive Computing via Synaptronics and Supercomputing (C2S2):
"By seeking inspiration from the structure, dynamics, function, and behavior of the brain, the IBM-led cognitive computing research team aims to break the conventional programmable machine paradigm. Ultimately, the team hopes to rival the brain’s low power consumption and small size by using nanoscale devices for synapses and neurons. This technology stands to bring about entirely new computing architectures and programming paradigms. The end goal: ubiquitously deployed computers imbued with a new intelligence that can integrate information from a variety of sensors and sources, deal with ambiguity, respond in a context-dependent way, learn over time and carry out pattern recognition to solve difficult problems based on perception, action and cognition in complex, real-world environments."
A couple of days ago a colleague sent me this interesting number, 142857, via email. I performed a Google search on the number and I was surprised to see so many returns -
159,000. It even has its own wiki page. For additional information, here is the
wiki page for this cyclic number - 142857.
Below is the email.
Subject: Interesting Numbers
Roy,
I want to let you know a weird number which is 142857.
Why?
142857 X 1 = 142857
142857 X 2 = 285714
142857 X 3 = 428571
142857 X 4 = 571428
142857 X 5 = 714285
142857 X 6 = 857142
See, the answers show all same numbers with different position.
142857 X 7 = 999999
142 + 857 = 999
14 + 28 + 57 = 99
142857 X 142857 = 20408122449
20408 + 122449 = 142857
Interesting, huh?
Here are some images from Tokyo CGM Night Episode 5 at KDDI Web
Communications the other night. The event was hosted on by Danny Choo and Andrew Shuttleworth, of course,
and it was nice to see a lot of friends and some interesting new
characters as well. Here is the home of CGM night at Danny
Choo`s place. Strange night, though. Too much light. Just as I was
starting to get used to shooting in the dark they turned the lights on.
Great fun as usual, though.
As part of the new
schedule for the website transition, there are two important deadlines to get collective infrastructure (Communities, Projects, User Groups) on opensolaris.org:
June 30th: Hidden Collectives: All collectives in a hidden state
on opensolaris.org must be opened by June 30th or they will be deleted.
Mail has been sent to these collective owners who will be affected. A
few weeks ago there were about 40 hidden collectives, but that list is
down to about a dozen now. On June 30th it will be zero. Also, on the
new site, there will be no feature for "hidden" collectives. The
current site's feature of hiding projects is a badly implemented bug.
Any user logged into the site can find a hidden project if they know
the URL (or are good at guessing), and repos from hidden projects show
up in searchers as well. The new site will not put up with this.
July 20th: New Collectives: There will be a moratorium on
setting up new collectives starting July 20th as we prepare to
implement Phase 1 of the transition (
Auth database goes live)
at the end of July. If you have outstanding proposals for new
Communities, Projects, or User Groups, you must send your approval
threads to the project-setup list by July 20th. Please refer to the new
Website Infrastructure: Collective Life Cycle Instructions document for implementation details when requesting new infrastructure.
Yesterday's
LOSUG was a little bit surreal as we were singing happy birthday to
OpenSolaris and had a birthday cake and a champagne.
June 17, 2009
The Sun Storage 7410 is our expandable storage appliance that can be hooked up to anywhere from one and twelve JBODs with 24 1TB disks. With all those disks we provide the several different options for how to arrange them into your storage pool: double-parity RAID-Z, wide-strip double-parity RAID-Z, mirror, striped, and single-parity RAID-Z with narrow stripes. Each of these options has a different mix of availability, performance, and capacity that are described both in the UI and in the installation documentation. With the wide array of supported configurations, it can be hard to know how much usable space each will support.
To address this, I wrote a python script that presents a hypothetical hardware configuration to an appliance and reports back the available options. We use the logic on the appliance itself to ensure that the results are completely accurate as the same algorithms would be applied as when then the physical pallet of hardware shows up. This, of course, requires you to have an appliance available to query — fortunately, you can run a virtual instance of the appliance on your laptop.
You can download the sizecalc.py here; you'll need python installed on the system where you run it. Note that the script uses XML-RPC to interact with the appliance, and consequently it relies on unstable interfaces that are subject to change. Others are welcome to interact with the appliance at the XML-RPC layer, but note that it's unstable and unsupported. If you're interested in scripting the appliance, take a look at Bryan's recent post. Feel free to post comments here if you have questions, but there's no support for the script, implied, explicit, unofficial or otherwise.
Running the script by itself produces a usage help message:
$ ./sizecalc.py
usage: ./sizecalc.py [ -h <half jbod count> ] <appliance name or address>
<root password> <jbod count>
Remember that you need a Sun Storage 7000 appliance (even a virtual one) to execute the capacity calculation. In this case, I'll specify a physical appliance running in our lab, and I'll start with a single JBOD (note that I've redacted the root password, but of course you'll need to type in the actual root password for your appliance):
$ ./sizecalc.py catfish ***** 1
type NSPF width spares data drives capacity (TB)
raidz2 False 11 2 22 18
raidz2 wide False 23 1 23 21
mirror False 2 2 22 11
stripe False 0 0 24 24
raidz1 False 4 4 20 15
Note that with only one JBOD no configurations support NSPF (No Single Point of Failure) since that one JBOD is always a single point of failure. If we go up to three JBODs, we'll see that we have a few more options:
$ ./sizecalc.py catfish ***** 3
type NSPF width spares data drives capacity (TB)
raidz2 False 13 7 65 55
raidz2 True 6 6 66 44
raidz2 wide False 34 4 68 64
raidz2 wide True 6 6 66 44
mirror False 2 4 68 34
mirror True 2 4 68 34
stripe False 0 0 72 72
raidz1 False 4 4 68 51
In this case we have to give up a bunch of capacity in order to attain NSPF. Now let's look at the largest configuration we support today with twelve JBODs:
$ ./sizecalc.py catfish ***** 12
type NSPF width spares data drives capacity (TB)
raidz2 False 14 8 280 240
raidz2 True 14 8 280 240
raidz2 wide False 47 6 282 270
raidz2 wide True 20 8 280 252
mirror False 2 4 284 142
mirror True 2 4 284 142
stripe False 0 0 288 288
raidz1 False 4 4 284 213
raidz1 True 4 4 284 213
The size calculator also allows you to model a system with Logzilla devices, write-optimized flash devices that form a key part of the Hybrid Storage Pool. After you specify the number of JBODs in the configuration, you can include a list of how many Logzillas are in each JBOD. For example, the following invocation models twelve JBODs with four Logzillas in the first 2 JBODs:
$ ./sizecalc.py catfish ***** 12 4 4
type NSPF width spares data drives capacity (TB)
raidz2 False 13 7 273 231
raidz2 True 13 7 273 231
raidz2 wide False 55 5 275 265
raidz2 wide True 23 4 276 252
mirror False 2 4 276 138
mirror True 2 4 276 138
stripe False 0 0 280 280
raidz1 False 4 4 276 207
raidz1 True 4 4 276 207
A very common area of confusion has been how to size Sun Storage 7410 systems, and the relationship between the physical storage and the delivered capacity. I hope that this little tool will help to answer those questions. A side benefit should be still more interest in the virtual version of the appliance — a subject I've been meaning to post about so stay tuned.
Update December 14, 2008: A couple of folks requested that the script allow for modeling half-JBOD allocations because the 7410 allows you to split JBODs between heads in a cluster. To accommodate this, I've added a -h option that takes as its parameter the number of half JBODs. For example:
$ ./sizecalc.py -h 12 192.168.18.134 ***** 0
type NSPF width spares data drives capacity (TB)
raidz2 False 14 4 140 120
raidz2 True 14 4 140 120
raidz2 wide False 35 4 140 132
raidz2 wide True 20 4 140 126
mirror False 2 4 140 70
mirror True 2 4 140 70
stripe False 0 0 144 144
raidz1 False 4 4 140 105
raidz1 True 4 4 140 105
Update February 4, 2009: Ryan Matthews and I collaborated on a new version of the size calculator that now lists the raw space available in TB (decimal as quoted by drive manufacturers for example) as well as the usable space in TiB (binary as reported by many system tools). The latter also takes account of the sliver (1/64th) reserved by ZFS:
$ ./sizecalc.py 192.168.18.134 ***** 12
type NSPF width spares data drives raw (TB) usable (TiB)
raidz2 False 14 8 280 240.00 214.87
raidz2 True 14 8 280 240.00 214.87
raidz2 wide False 47 6 282 270.00 241.73
raidz2 wide True 20 8 280 252.00 225.61
mirror False 2 4 284 142.00 127.13
mirror True 2 4 284 142.00 127.13
stripe False 0 0 288 288.00 257.84
raidz1 False 4 4 284 213.00 190.70
raidz1 True 4 4 284 213.00 190.70
Update June 17, 2009: Ryan Matthews with help from has again revised the size calculator to model both adding expansion JBODs and to account for the now expandable Sun Storage 7210. Take a look at Ryan's post for usage information. Here's an example of the output:
$ ./sizecalc.py 172.16.131.131 *** 1 h1 add 1 h add 1
Sun Storage 7000 Size Calculator Version 2009.Q2
type NSPF width spares data drives raw (TB) usable (TiB)
mirror False 2 5 42 21.00 18.80
raidz1 False 4 11 36 27.00 24.17
raidz2 False 10-11 4 43 35.00 31.33
raidz2 wide False 10-23 3 44 38.00 34.02
stripe False 0 0 47 47.00 42.08
I drafted a new document to answer questions about collective life cycle issues on opensolaris.org -- Website Infrastructure: Collective Life Cycle Instructions. The document lives in the Website Community Group and attempts to explain the infrastructure implementation procedures I go through on project-setup for Community Groups, Projects, and User Groups. It also points to all the other documents that are involved in various stages. We can`t unify all those documents at the moment, so I thought that a doc outlining basic procedures and putting the other docs in context would be helpful and would simplify some things. I think I got everything in there for this first cut, but I am sure it will all evolve over time. Glynn Foster drafted an excellent group life cycle document as part of the proposed constitution in March, but that entire effort wasn`t successful so I`ll work it this way and see where we go. At the very least, it helps clarify the implementation part of the process.
A couple of user group meetings next week in the northeastern US. For those in New England,
NEOSUG is meeting on June 23. I won't be there, though, as I'll be in New York for some customer events and will also be speaking about the OpenSolaris deployment technologies at the
NYC user group meeting on June 25. Hope to see you there!
Over at The Observatory, Brian Leonard posted more information on how to use the compare feature I implemented in the file version explorer of Time-slider.
Thanks Brian :)
In the next version the compare feature will get even more interesting, if time permits ! Watch this space...
This version is a major update. The following major new features were added:
- Guest SMP with up to 32 virtual CPUs (VT-x and AMD-V only)
- Windows guests: ability to use Direct3D 8/9 applications / games (experimental)
- Support for OpenGL 2.0 for Windows, Linux and Solaris guests
In addition, the following items were fixed and/or added:
- Virtual mouse device: eliminated micro-movements of the virtual mouse which were confusing some applications (bug #3782)
- Solaris hosts: allow suspend/resume on the host when a VM is running (bug #3826)
- Solaris hosts: tighten the restriction for contiguous physical memory under certain conditions
- VMM: fixed occassional guru meditation when loading a saved state (VT-x only)
- VMM: eliminated IO-APIC overhead with 32 bits guests (VT-x only, some Intel CPUs don’t support this feature (most do); bug #638)
- VMM: fixed 64 bits CentOS guest hangs during early boot (AMD-V only; bug #3927)
- VMM: performance improvements for certain PAE guests (e.g. Linux 2.6.29+ kernels)
- GUI: added mini toolbar for fullscreen and seamless mode (Thanks to Huihong Luo)
- GUI: redesigned settings dialogs
- GUI: allow to create/remove one host-only network adapters
- GUI: display estimated time for long running operations (e.g. OVF import/ export)
- GUI: Fixed rare hangs when open the OVF import/export wizards (bug #4157)
- VRDP: support Windows 7 RDP client
- Networking: fixed another problem with TX checksum offloading with Linux kernels up to version 2.6.18
- VHD: properly write empty sectors when cloning of VHD images (bug #4080)
- VHD: fixed crash when discarding snapshots of a VHD image
- VBoxManage: fixed incorrect partition table processing when creating VMDK files giving raw partition access (bug #3510)
- OVF: several OVF 1.0 compatibility fixes
- Shared Folders: sometimes a file was created using the wrong permissions (2.2.0 regression; bug #3785)
- Shared Folders: allow to change file attributes from Linux guests and use the correct file mode when creating files
- Shared Folders: fixed incorrect file timestamps, when using Windows guest on a Linux host (bug #3404)
- Linux guests: new daemon vboxadd-service to handle time syncronization and guest property lookup
- Linux guests: implemented guest properties (OS info, logged in users, basic network information)
- Windows host installer: VirtualBox Python API can now be installed automatically (requires Python and Win32 Extensions installed)
- USB: Support for high-speed isochronous endpoints has been added. In addition, read-ahead buffering is performed for input endpoints (currently Linux hosts only). This should allow additional devices to work, notably webcams.
- NAT: allow to configure socket and internal parameters
- Registration dialog uses Sun Online accounts now.
Going to
CommunityOne
in San Francisco next week?
Here's
the schedule. Don't forget the
"deep dives" they have in there, too.
You can register for those sessions right here. It's free.
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