Hello everybody, there's a special guest with us. Would you like to introduce yourself? Yeah, hi, I'm Tim Kramer. I'm the Engineering Director in charge of Core Open Solaris Engineering. The reason that role becomes exciting here is because I was curious to ask you about what we can expect in the new version of Open Solaris. One of the things we've been doing is rapidly innovating. This is a little bit different than our traditional Solaris releases where they're coming out every two to three years with some updates in between. What we're doing is radically changing and modifying Open Solaris as quickly as possible. So, over the last six months we've actually gotten in over 200 new packages. One of the big things that we have is we're on the modern GNOME 2.24 desktop. We also have some community contributed packages, so things like Firefox 3 is there. It also has D-Trace Probes enabled in it, so you can actually utilize the NetBeans tools to go out and observe and do performance analysis. Oh, so Firefox has D-Trace Probes. Yes. Right, right, right. Which is pretty cool and really you can only take advantage of that today on Open Solaris. And then we also have Songbird, which gives us multimedia capability. Right, so you can play. It's like an iTunes-ish client. It's really, really cool. And it's integrated with browsing capabilities, so you really get a really nice, rich experience for your music collection. When we got GNOME 2.24, we picked up a lot of the applications that are coming in from there. So, we have things like BitTorrent Client with Transmission. We got Gobby. We got Tracker for Search. All sorts of things like that that just come with GNOME. One of the things that you started out by saying is you're more rapidly innovating or more rapidly coming out with versions on the Open Solaris. One of the things that we're trying to do with Open Solaris that's different from traditional Solaris is that we're modernizing it. We're making it much more familiar to Linux users, so you're going to see a lot of changes there.
2:02Continually make sure that we have more of the Linux-like path and commands that are available. Administration is still a little bit different, and we're going to be working on that as we go forward. One of the things that we're also doing is we are paying attention to sort of the enterprise market as well. Right. So, we do have some features available and some enhancements that would make sense in deployment. The automated installer, which is going to preview in this release. We also have a distro constructor that's going to preview in this release. The distro constructor allows you to create a customized bootable Open Solaris image. All right. And then the automated installer will let you provision that across a bunch of machines. So, those two things will be in preview for this release, and then we'll nail that and get, you know, we'll get a bunch of feedback, incorporate that feedback, and then nail that for our next release, which would be in May of 2000. So, basically, it means sort of provisioning and sort of the configuration. Yes. Is what those two. Yeah. I'm curious, like, what the type of adoption you've been seeing out there is. Like, who are some of the folks who have been using it? We actually started about three years ago with the Open Solaris project. Right. When we started it out. And then we had a few releases like the Solaris Express Developer Edition. Sure. And then we had the Community Edition that comes out every two weeks. Right. And that's basically, it's based off the Open Solaris project. Right. Yeah. What we've done with Open Solaris, or the Open Solaris product from Sun, the first one released in May of 2008. And this is our second then release, which is November. Right. And so, you see, we're six months apart. The next one's five months after that. So, we're trying to deliver things rapidly. We have sort of a core set of Open Solaris. You know, in the core of our Open Solaris community, we have a lot of people that were very interested in making Open Solaris a better operating system. Right. People that have been helping us with modifying the kernel and doing some, you know, user land stuff just right outside the kernel and have been actively working on that.
4:07We've got a number of contributions that have come in from the community that we've been able to integrate and then improve the base system. With 2008.11, we're finally getting the ability to go after more of the user applications that are sitting on top of it as well and try to attract new communities. Because it's finally getting interesting from a developer standpoint and also from a deployment standpoint. We do have a number of companies that we have relationships with that are partners of ours that we've been working with. So, Intel is a big partner. AMD is another very big partner that we have. And IBM, which we recently announced, who have a port of Open Solaris on their… On System Z, right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I thought that was just a few days. Yeah, we finally made that announcement. So, you know, we have a number of big partners. We also have some companies that are going off and grabbing Open Solaris and doing some actual commercial deployments with it. So, Reliant is one that built a security box that they're actively selling and supporting. And there are some others that are out there as well. You think Open Solaris works, you know, going on that Reliant thing? Because it works sort of as the embedded is the wrong word. But there's a lot of Linux that runs on appliances of varying sizes. And I wonder if that's something that you see Solaris as fitting well into it. I think that Open Solaris will work well in the appliance market. Right, right. And that's, in fact, we're kind of setting it up that way. With the distro constructor, you can take subsets of the operating system that you want and add in your value add and just create an appliance. Go off and market that. So, Reliant is one that's basically done exactly that and been fairly successful with it. Right. Yeah. So, that business model is there for people that want to come into the community and do this kind of work. And so, like you're saying, it sounds like the, if I have the version, I'm right, the 2000.11 version. It's like you sort of, in the previous version, you sort of built up the, you had a lot of foundational stuff, just getting the version out there.
6:13And it sounds like there's a fair amount of application sort of centric things that you have on there. And then, like you're saying, command line things like sudo and top and so forth and so on. And so, it sounds like there was a loop of users saying, we need these things in an operating system or we want these sorts of things. And you're adding some of those things in. Yes. We've been focusing on two fronts. We've been looking at what is necessary to get some decent deployment. Right. So, as an example, the AMP stack is updated. We've got all new components in the AMP stack. It has D-trace probes enabled in it so that you can do observability and performance analysis of your AMP stack. It's got the latest version of MySQL in there as well. So, that's really been tuned up and we started adding in some of the frameworks on top of it. So, we'll have Drupal and MediaWiki and Roller and Django. So, all those guys will be in there as well. Yeah. And that's what we want to keep building out over time, right? So, this release of 2008.11, we can start actually, you know, building up more of the frameworks that sit on top of the infrastructure. So, looking forward, what's sort of the next sort of things that you guys are looking at working on? Oh, so, yeah. If we want to go forward to, let's say, the April 2009 release, one of the things that's on our dashboard is we're going to add in the Crossbow project. So, for those that don't know Crossbow, it's a rewrite of Layer 2 networking. Okay. And so, it's a big deal. There's going to be gigantic performance improvements, but also all the virtualization features are going to be there as well. So, you'll finally have virtualized NICs, things like that you can do now, which we haven't been able to do before. It provides sort of amazing types of applications with having a virtualized NIC. You can do things like Bandwidth Star of a NIC. So, if you're getting a denial of service attack or something like that, you can actually, if you're running it in a virtualized environment, you can just shut down that one virtual NIC and stop that traffic completely.
8:13Or, if you want to meter the amount of traffic, for example, you're running something that you consider business critical, that you want to have most of the network assigned to that, but you also have some other applications that should be able to utilize at least some bandwidth. You can control all of that automatically with the Crossbow project. And that'll actually go into our developer release in December. So, for those that really want to be on the bleeding edge, we'll have our release out there, which will be stable for six months. You won't see a lot of change there. And then we'll have our every two-week builds that will continue to get out there. And in early December, we'll get the Crossbow one back there so people can start playing with it. I mean, that is, you know, kind of a nice aspect of the open part of it, right? In theory, there shouldn't be that many surprise features that suddenly come out because you can observe, like you're saying, you can look at the builds and kind of see the things built into it. Yeah, we're trying to make it pretty obvious. So, also in the April release, we're going to have further networking Automagic improvements. We'll have, the distro constructor will complete, automated install will complete. So, we'll really have sort of more of the enterprise-ready features there. We'll also have Spark support. Oh, okay. Right, so that's one of the things that, we've been x86 only up until this point. In December, we'll also have, in our developer release, we'll have the first drop of the Spark bits. And we'll continue to work and modify those. And in April, we'll have the officially supported versions. Right, right. So, those will be big deals. I think there's quite a bit on the plate there. Yeah, we're, I think it's amazing with the size team that we have. We are really getting a lot of stuff in. Right. And, you know, the rest of the company and the community are really helping out, right? It seems to be catching on pretty well so far. So, we're getting cool applications and packages coming from other places, which is great. So, one of the things that I think has been an issue in the past is that we've had some really cool technology,
10:13but you kind of had to be a rocket scientist to figure out how to use it. So, ZFS is one of the typical ones, right? Yeah. So, we always, ZFS is great, but how do you make that practical for day-to-day use? So, there's a couple of features that we have now with ZFS that make it really neat. So, we have this time slider feature, which I can actually show you running, where you can go back in time and you can grab old files and things like that and set up how often you want to take snapshots. It's not a space hog either because what it does is it only takes snapshots of the differences, you know, as you go through time. And then you can give it a boundary for how much disk space you want to use. It can throw out old versions. It's sort of like a difference-driven backup, if you will. Yeah. And the other thing that's kind of interesting is, have you ever been on your Linux system and you decided that you wanted to, you know, go grab some random package off the net, right? And you install it and it screws your system, right? What we have is the ability to roll back, which is really nice then. So, you can go ahead and experiment and if it ends up like, oh man, I got this package and I shouldn't have put that on there and now my system's all messed up, you can actually just go back in time and go back to your stable system and then start... Right. And what we do is we, you don't have to go in and explicitly figure out that you should do this. So, if you're using our packaging system, it automatically snapshots before it adds in the new stuff. Right, right. So, just in case you forgot, we've got that covered. Right. Well, we'll have to check out a demo of that. All right.