1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:05,000 Hello everybody, there's a special guest with us. Would you like to introduce yourself? 2 00:00:05,000 --> 00:00:11,000 Yeah, hi, I'm Tim Kramer. I'm the Engineering Director in charge of Core Open Solaris Engineering. 3 00:00:11,000 --> 00:00:18,000 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. 4 00:00:18,000 --> 00:00:21,000 One of the things we've been doing is rapidly innovating. 5 00:00:21,000 --> 00:00:29,000 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. 6 00:00:29,000 --> 00:00:34,000 What we're doing is radically changing and modifying Open Solaris as quickly as possible. 7 00:00:34,000 --> 00:00:39,000 So, over the last six months we've actually gotten in over 200 new packages. 8 00:00:39,000 --> 00:00:44,000 One of the big things that we have is we're on the modern GNOME 2.24 desktop. 9 00:00:44,000 --> 00:00:51,000 We also have some community contributed packages, so things like Firefox 3 is there. 10 00:00:51,000 --> 00:01:02,000 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. 11 00:01:02,000 --> 00:01:04,000 Oh, so Firefox has D-Trace Probes. 12 00:01:04,000 --> 00:01:05,000 Yes. 13 00:01:05,000 --> 00:01:06,000 Right, right, right. 14 00:01:06,000 --> 00:01:10,000 Which is pretty cool and really you can only take advantage of that today on Open Solaris. 15 00:01:10,000 --> 00:01:14,000 And then we also have Songbird, which gives us multimedia capability. 16 00:01:14,000 --> 00:01:15,000 Right, so you can play. 17 00:01:15,000 --> 00:01:16,000 It's like an iTunes-ish client. 18 00:01:16,000 --> 00:01:18,000 It's really, really cool. 19 00:01:18,000 --> 00:01:28,000 And it's integrated with browsing capabilities, so you really get a really nice, rich experience for your music collection. 20 00:01:28,000 --> 00:01:33,000 When we got GNOME 2.24, we picked up a lot of the applications that are coming in from there. 21 00:01:33,000 --> 00:01:36,000 So, we have things like BitTorrent Client with Transmission. 22 00:01:36,000 --> 00:01:37,000 We got Gobby. 23 00:01:37,000 --> 00:01:40,000 We got Tracker for Search. 24 00:01:40,000 --> 00:01:43,000 All sorts of things like that that just come with GNOME. 25 00:01:43,000 --> 00:01:51,000 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. 26 00:01:51,000 --> 00:01:57,000 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. 27 00:01:57,000 --> 00:02:02,000 We're making it much more familiar to Linux users, so you're going to see a lot of changes there. 28 00:02:02,000 --> 00:02:09,000 Continually make sure that we have more of the Linux-like path and commands that are available. 29 00:02:09,000 --> 00:02:16,000 Administration is still a little bit different, and we're going to be working on that as we go forward. 30 00:02:16,000 --> 00:02:21,000 One of the things that we're also doing is we are paying attention to sort of the enterprise market as well. 31 00:02:21,000 --> 00:02:22,000 Right. 32 00:02:22,000 --> 00:02:27,000 So, we do have some features available and some enhancements that would make sense in deployment. 33 00:02:27,000 --> 00:02:31,000 The automated installer, which is going to preview in this release. 34 00:02:31,000 --> 00:02:34,000 We also have a distro constructor that's going to preview in this release. 35 00:02:34,000 --> 00:02:39,000 The distro constructor allows you to create a customized bootable Open Solaris image. 36 00:02:39,000 --> 00:02:40,000 All right. 37 00:02:40,000 --> 00:02:44,000 And then the automated installer will let you provision that across a bunch of machines. 38 00:02:44,000 --> 00:02:53,000 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. 39 00:02:53,000 --> 00:02:57,000 So, basically, it means sort of provisioning and sort of the configuration. 40 00:02:57,000 --> 00:02:58,000 Yes. 41 00:02:58,000 --> 00:02:59,000 Is what those two. 42 00:02:59,000 --> 00:03:00,000 Yeah. 43 00:03:00,000 --> 00:03:03,000 I'm curious, like, what the type of adoption you've been seeing out there is. 44 00:03:03,000 --> 00:03:06,000 Like, who are some of the folks who have been using it? 45 00:03:06,000 --> 00:03:09,000 We actually started about three years ago with the Open Solaris project. 46 00:03:09,000 --> 00:03:10,000 Right. 47 00:03:10,000 --> 00:03:11,000 When we started it out. 48 00:03:11,000 --> 00:03:15,000 And then we had a few releases like the Solaris Express Developer Edition. 49 00:03:15,000 --> 00:03:16,000 Sure. 50 00:03:16,000 --> 00:03:20,000 And then we had the Community Edition that comes out every two weeks. 51 00:03:20,000 --> 00:03:21,000 Right. 52 00:03:21,000 --> 00:03:25,000 And that's basically, it's based off the Open Solaris project. 53 00:03:25,000 --> 00:03:26,000 Right. 54 00:03:26,000 --> 00:03:27,000 Yeah. 55 00:03:27,000 --> 00:03:34,000 What we've done with Open Solaris, or the Open Solaris product from Sun, the first one released in May of 2008. 56 00:03:34,000 --> 00:03:37,000 And this is our second then release, which is November. 57 00:03:37,000 --> 00:03:38,000 Right. 58 00:03:38,000 --> 00:03:40,000 And so, you see, we're six months apart. 59 00:03:40,000 --> 00:03:42,000 The next one's five months after that. 60 00:03:42,000 --> 00:03:45,000 So, we're trying to deliver things rapidly. 61 00:03:45,000 --> 00:03:48,000 We have sort of a core set of Open Solaris. 62 00:03:48,000 --> 00:03:57,000 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. 63 00:03:57,000 --> 00:03:58,000 Right. 64 00:03:58,000 --> 00:04:07,000 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. 65 00:04:07,000 --> 00:04:16,000 We'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. 66 00:04:16,000 --> 00:04:26,000 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. 67 00:04:26,000 --> 00:04:32,000 Because it's finally getting interesting from a developer standpoint and also from a deployment standpoint. 68 00:04:32,000 --> 00:04:40,000 We do have a number of companies that we have relationships with that are partners of ours that we've been working with. 69 00:04:40,000 --> 00:04:42,000 So, Intel is a big partner. 70 00:04:42,000 --> 00:04:45,000 AMD is another very big partner that we have. 71 00:04:45,000 --> 00:04:49,000 And IBM, which we recently announced, who have a port of Open Solaris on their… 72 00:04:49,000 --> 00:04:50,000 On System Z, right? 73 00:04:50,000 --> 00:04:51,000 Yeah. 74 00:04:51,000 --> 00:04:52,000 Yeah, yeah. 75 00:04:52,000 --> 00:04:53,000 I thought that was just a few days. 76 00:04:53,000 --> 00:04:56,000 Yeah, we finally made that announcement. 77 00:04:56,000 --> 00:04:59,000 So, you know, we have a number of big partners. 78 00:04:59,000 --> 00:05:07,000 We also have some companies that are going off and grabbing Open Solaris and doing some actual commercial deployments with it. 79 00:05:07,000 --> 00:05:14,000 So, Reliant is one that built a security box that they're actively selling and supporting. 80 00:05:14,000 --> 00:05:17,000 And there are some others that are out there as well. 81 00:05:17,000 --> 00:05:20,000 You think Open Solaris works, you know, going on that Reliant thing? 82 00:05:20,000 --> 00:05:23,000 Because it works sort of as the embedded is the wrong word. 83 00:05:23,000 --> 00:05:26,000 But there's a lot of Linux that runs on appliances of varying sizes. 84 00:05:26,000 --> 00:05:31,000 And I wonder if that's something that you see Solaris as fitting well into it. 85 00:05:31,000 --> 00:05:34,000 I think that Open Solaris will work well in the appliance market. 86 00:05:34,000 --> 00:05:35,000 Right, right. 87 00:05:35,000 --> 00:05:37,000 And that's, in fact, we're kind of setting it up that way. 88 00:05:37,000 --> 00:05:45,000 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. 89 00:05:45,000 --> 00:05:46,000 Go off and market that. 90 00:05:46,000 --> 00:05:53,000 So, Reliant is one that's basically done exactly that and been fairly successful with it. 91 00:05:53,000 --> 00:05:54,000 Right. 92 00:05:54,000 --> 00:05:55,000 Yeah. 93 00:05:55,000 --> 00:05:59,000 So, that business model is there for people that want to come into the community and do this kind of work. 94 00:05:59,000 --> 00:06:04,000 And so, like you're saying, it sounds like the, if I have the version, I'm right, the 2000.11 version. 95 00:06:04,000 --> 00:06:13,000 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. 96 00:06:13,000 --> 00:06:18,000 And it sounds like there's a fair amount of application sort of centric things that you have on there. 97 00:06:18,000 --> 00:06:23,000 And then, like you're saying, command line things like sudo and top and so forth and so on. 98 00:06:23,000 --> 00:06:30,000 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. 99 00:06:30,000 --> 00:06:32,000 And you're adding some of those things in. 100 00:06:32,000 --> 00:06:33,000 Yes. 101 00:06:33,000 --> 00:06:34,000 We've been focusing on two fronts. 102 00:06:34,000 --> 00:06:38,000 We've been looking at what is necessary to get some decent deployment. 103 00:06:38,000 --> 00:06:39,000 Right. 104 00:06:39,000 --> 00:06:43,000 So, as an example, the AMP stack is updated. 105 00:06:43,000 --> 00:06:45,000 We've got all new components in the AMP stack. 106 00:06:45,000 --> 00:06:51,000 It has D-trace probes enabled in it so that you can do observability and performance analysis of your AMP stack. 107 00:06:51,000 --> 00:06:54,000 It's got the latest version of MySQL in there as well. 108 00:06:54,000 --> 00:07:00,000 So, that's really been tuned up and we started adding in some of the frameworks on top of it. 109 00:07:00,000 --> 00:07:05,000 So, we'll have Drupal and MediaWiki and Roller and Django. 110 00:07:05,000 --> 00:07:07,000 So, all those guys will be in there as well. 111 00:07:07,000 --> 00:07:08,000 Yeah. 112 00:07:08,000 --> 00:07:10,000 And that's what we want to keep building out over time, right? 113 00:07:10,000 --> 00:07:18,000 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. 114 00:07:18,000 --> 00:07:24,000 So, looking forward, what's sort of the next sort of things that you guys are looking at working on? 115 00:07:24,000 --> 00:07:26,000 Oh, so, yeah. 116 00:07:26,000 --> 00:07:34,000 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. 117 00:07:34,000 --> 00:07:40,000 So, for those that don't know Crossbow, it's a rewrite of Layer 2 networking. 118 00:07:40,000 --> 00:07:41,000 Okay. 119 00:07:41,000 --> 00:07:42,000 And so, it's a big deal. 120 00:07:42,000 --> 00:07:47,000 There's going to be gigantic performance improvements, but also all the virtualization features are going to be there as well. 121 00:07:47,000 --> 00:07:53,000 So, you'll finally have virtualized NICs, things like that you can do now, which we haven't been able to do before. 122 00:07:53,000 --> 00:07:58,000 It provides sort of amazing types of applications with having a virtualized NIC. 123 00:07:58,000 --> 00:08:01,000 You can do things like Bandwidth Star of a NIC. 124 00:08:01,000 --> 00:08:13,000 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. 125 00:08:13,000 --> 00:08:27,000 Or, 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. 126 00:08:27,000 --> 00:08:31,000 You can control all of that automatically with the Crossbow project. 127 00:08:31,000 --> 00:08:34,000 And that'll actually go into our developer release in December. 128 00:08:34,000 --> 00:08:41,000 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. 129 00:08:41,000 --> 00:08:43,000 You won't see a lot of change there. 130 00:08:43,000 --> 00:08:48,000 And then we'll have our every two-week builds that will continue to get out there. 131 00:08:48,000 --> 00:08:53,000 And in early December, we'll get the Crossbow one back there so people can start playing with it. 132 00:08:53,000 --> 00:08:57,000 I mean, that is, you know, kind of a nice aspect of the open part of it, right? 133 00:08:57,000 --> 00:09:07,000 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. 134 00:09:07,000 --> 00:09:09,000 Yeah, we're trying to make it pretty obvious. 135 00:09:09,000 --> 00:09:15,000 So, also in the April release, we're going to have further networking Automagic improvements. 136 00:09:15,000 --> 00:09:19,000 We'll have, the distro constructor will complete, automated install will complete. 137 00:09:19,000 --> 00:09:23,000 So, we'll really have sort of more of the enterprise-ready features there. 138 00:09:23,000 --> 00:09:24,000 We'll also have Spark support. 139 00:09:24,000 --> 00:09:25,000 Oh, okay. 140 00:09:25,000 --> 00:09:30,000 Right, so that's one of the things that, we've been x86 only up until this point. 141 00:09:30,000 --> 00:09:36,000 In December, we'll also have, in our developer release, we'll have the first drop of the Spark bits. 142 00:09:36,000 --> 00:09:39,000 And we'll continue to work and modify those. 143 00:09:39,000 --> 00:09:42,000 And in April, we'll have the officially supported versions. 144 00:09:42,000 --> 00:09:43,000 Right, right. 145 00:09:43,000 --> 00:09:44,000 So, those will be big deals. 146 00:09:44,000 --> 00:09:46,000 I think there's quite a bit on the plate there. 147 00:09:46,000 --> 00:09:52,000 Yeah, we're, I think it's amazing with the size team that we have. 148 00:09:52,000 --> 00:09:54,000 We are really getting a lot of stuff in. 149 00:09:54,000 --> 00:09:55,000 Right. 150 00:09:55,000 --> 00:09:59,000 And, you know, the rest of the company and the community are really helping out, right? 151 00:09:59,000 --> 00:10:01,000 It seems to be catching on pretty well so far. 152 00:10:01,000 --> 00:10:06,000 So, we're getting cool applications and packages coming from other places, which is great. 153 00:10:06,000 --> 00:10:13,000 So, one of the things that I think has been an issue in the past is that we've had some really cool technology, 154 00:10:13,000 --> 00:10:16,000 but you kind of had to be a rocket scientist to figure out how to use it. 155 00:10:16,000 --> 00:10:19,000 So, ZFS is one of the typical ones, right? 156 00:10:19,000 --> 00:10:20,000 Yeah. 157 00:10:20,000 --> 00:10:26,000 So, we always, ZFS is great, but how do you make that practical for day-to-day use? 158 00:10:26,000 --> 00:10:30,000 So, there's a couple of features that we have now with ZFS that make it really neat. 159 00:10:30,000 --> 00:10:37,000 So, we have this time slider feature, which I can actually show you running, where you can go back in time 160 00:10:37,000 --> 00:10:41,000 and you can grab old files and things like that and set up how often you want to take snapshots. 161 00:10:41,000 --> 00:10:47,000 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. 162 00:10:47,000 --> 00:10:50,000 And then you can give it a boundary for how much disk space you want to use. 163 00:10:50,000 --> 00:10:51,000 It can throw out old versions. 164 00:10:51,000 --> 00:10:53,000 It's sort of like a difference-driven backup, if you will. 165 00:10:53,000 --> 00:10:54,000 Yeah. 166 00:10:54,000 --> 00:11:00,000 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, 167 00:11:00,000 --> 00:11:02,000 go grab some random package off the net, right? 168 00:11:02,000 --> 00:11:04,000 And you install it and it screws your system, right? 169 00:11:04,000 --> 00:11:08,000 What we have is the ability to roll back, which is really nice then. 170 00:11:08,000 --> 00:11:14,000 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 171 00:11:14,000 --> 00:11:19,000 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... 172 00:11:19,000 --> 00:11:20,000 Right. 173 00:11:20,000 --> 00:11:24,000 And what we do is we, you don't have to go in and explicitly figure out that you should do this. 174 00:11:24,000 --> 00:11:29,000 So, if you're using our packaging system, it automatically snapshots before it adds in the new stuff. 175 00:11:29,000 --> 00:11:30,000 Right, right. 176 00:11:30,000 --> 00:11:31,000 So, just in case you forgot, we've got that covered. 177 00:11:31,000 --> 00:11:32,000 Right. 178 00:11:32,000 --> 00:11:33,000 Well, we'll have to check out a demo of that. 179 00:11:33,000 --> 00:11:34,000 All right.