[opensolaris-summit] OS Summit topic proposal

[Dennis Clarke]

> Stefan Teleman wrote:
>> Hi.
>>
>> I would like to propose a topic for the OS Summit in October:
>>
>> C++ Standard Compliant: Sun Studio 12, BOOST and the Apache/RogueWave
>> Standard
>> C++ Library
>>
>> This will be a presentation and discussion about Sun Studio 12, C++
>> Standards
>> Compliance [http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/], BOOST
>> [http://www.boost.org/] and the Apache/RogueWave Standard C++ Library
>> [http://incubator.apache.org/stdcxx/].
>>
>>
>> --Stefan
>>
>>
>

    Firstly, I want to thank you for your great work on drivers for Solaris
and certainly for your recent QFE work :

    http://gdamore.blogspot.com/2007/08/qfe-gldv3.html

    The QFE is almost the swiss army knife of ethernet in the Sun hardware
world and you have brought this forwards to present day capabilities
with GLDv3. Amazing work Garrett.

    Thank you for your great work.

> Btw, if other folks have any interest, I'd be happy to chat about device
> drivers and OpenSolaris.  My personal area of expertise is mainly
> networking (and lately GLDv3), but I have expertise elsewhere with
> drivers as well.   I don't mind doing a GLDv3 tutorial (either porting
> from GLDv2 or from pure DLPI) if there is interest.... although I sort
> of suspect there isn't enough interest.  (I can also talk sensibly about
> power management, dynamic reconfiguration, etc.)

  There is interest and I wish that you would and could do a total brain
dump of everything you know into tons of web based pages of docs for those
of us in the mindless masses out here! :-)

  The more drivers the better. Certainly if they are good ones.

> I'm not *asking* for a topic, or *asking* to give a talk, but merely
> suggesting, that if there is sufficient demand from developers or
> developer-would-bes, then I'm happy to help.  I believe that developer
> adoption is critical for OpenSolaris' long term viability.

  I wish that you could do a full day lecture with hands on work.

  What would that cost? Can we spec out a lecture and then see if we can put
together a cost sheet?  It would certainly be an easy business case for
me.

> One of the areas that OpenSolaris as a group needs to address, IMO, is
> how we handle supporting various bits of hardware, and 3rd party
> drivers, even ones that Sun may not necessarily have an interest in.

  The OpenSolaris community will have an interest. Someone out there always
seems to want a driver for their USB port powered coffee heater.

> (For example, how does Sun deal with device drivers that are
> "competitive" to their own business... such as 10GbE adapters?)  So far
> its been handled pretty well, but the issues of device qualification,
> and sustaining support are of significant concern.

  Please explain why that would be *our* problem?

     (1) Pick a device, any device,
     (2) craft a driver for it
     (3) .. release the code.

  no problem.

> Another issue that I'd like to see dealt with is defect/CR tracking.
> Right now, it is impossible to get a bugster category, even as a Sun
> employee, for a product that does not have a Sun manager.  (For example,
> I was unable to get a category for issues relating to Tadpole platform
> support... because no manager at Sun owns this, apparently.  Now, my
> current manager has agreed to sign up as the owner for such a category,
> but that doesn't scale well... longer term we need a solution which
> accommodates 3rd party hardware better.)

  That is easy to fix also.  We simply create a bug tracking site.  We can
install it into a zone at genunix.org and then go forwards.

Dennis