The Blog of Ben Rockwood

Max Bruning at CommunityOne: Solaris Device Drivers

09 Oct '09 - 20:54 by benr

Max Bruning is one of my great heros. He's an amazing guy and incredible educator. At CommunityOne he did a 3 hour presentation on developing Solaris Device Drivers and, perhaps even more important to the readers of this blog, kernel debugging. If you have a passing familiarity with core dump analysis using mdb, you'll learn an incredible amount of skills from the latter portion of his presentation.

This is, imho, must view material for any serious Solaris administrator! Set aside some time and enjoy the talk, you won't regret it.

- - C O M M E N T S - -
What is up with the font he’s using?

Dave - 09 October '09 - 21:30

I was there for this presentation. It was the best one I attended at CommunityOne.

Bill Rushmore (Email) (URL) - 10 October '09 - 01:43

“This is, imho, must view material for any serious Solaris administrator!”

See, this is where I think you’re blatantly wrong. We’ve had this discussion regarding DTrace before.

System administrators are not equipped (by both skillset and education) to deal with the kernel development, debugging, or even system engineering; they’re 2nd level support.

What you’re referring to are system engineers, people one level above the senior system administrator. 3rd level support. People cabable of administering, developing, (kernel) debugging and analysis, and most importantly – architecting a system or a network.

Your average sysadmin of the 21st century is completely overwhelmed with the words “kernel” or “debugging”. They are not system engineers. And they are most definitely not enthusiasts like you, which hover between the worlds of senior system administration, development, and system engineering. You are a very, very rare and exotic breed in this day and age. And unfortunately, a minority.

UX-admin (Email) - 10 October '09 - 13:24

@UX-admin: I admin readily that the line between “Sr SysAdmin” and “SysEng” is blurred… in fact my Joyent title is “Director of Systems Engineering”.

In the case of Max’s talk, most of it will go over the heads of SysAdmins, clearly, but its interesting to hear about. Towards the end he does some debugging in mdb and there are interesting tricks for sysadmins who might be doing core analysis; such as walking stacks and such, but I entirely agree that its outside the scope of a typical SA workload.

Its interesting that you bring this up because after my recent experience at HP-UX and the ensuing discussion here in this blog I’m questioning that very distinction more and more. The HP-UX/AIX “SysAdmin” doesn’t “fix” things, they call support and demand to know why it broke… in the Solaris world we’re a much more DYI bunch. Its just something in the culture.

benr - 10 October '09 - 19:48

Oh, I happen to agree with you. And kernel engineering is pretty much the “end of the line” in computer science or IT—that’s about as deep and as involved as one can get.

There is something to what you observed with regards to HP-UX and DIY in Solaris, and I think it has to do with the fact that HP-UX is much more closed and obscure operating system than Solaris is. On top of that, when one installs HP-UX, one gets practically nothing but the “enterprise” features, presuming one had the “fat connection” and was able to obtain the unlocked media (or her/his organization coughed up the big $$$ for the license).

Bearing that in mind, it turns out that since hp delivers a much smaller subset of software, there isn’t any DIY to to, because there isn’t anything to finish on that small controlled subset of software.

Over here where we are in Solaris land, the new religion is “release early, release often”, and some features that are even in Solaris 10 aren’t fully cooked (limits on ZFS Flash, or SMF manipulation being stereotypical examples) and so DIY on Solaris is the way we live, and have always lived. (And sometimes, that can get to me really bad.)

However the picture isn’t all that different in HP-UX land: for example, I had to write the code for SD-UX to remove empty directories myself. Or try porting Python, making a libbz2.so or doing any other freeware, and you’ll know what DIY on HP-UX looks like (it’s not pretty, and it needs a lot, lot of work, and tons of proficiency with linking and compiling).

I think you would enjoy that challenge. It’s too bad that HP-UX’s barrier to entry

To recap: hp’s UNIX is much less DIY, because there is so much LESS of HP-UX to work on. It’s not a big OS by any means, and is very spartan in features.

UX-admin (Email) - 10 October '09 - 23:17

Thanks Ben (and Bill).

I also would like to know what font I was using…

I am doing a kernel debugging tutorial at OSdevcon in Hamburg at the end of the month. My plan is to give attendees a couple of simple bugs that they can place on their computer, and then walk through the analysis. Hope you can make it.

Max Bruning (Email) (URL) - 12 October '09 - 17:02

Oops. OSdevcon is in Dresden, not Hamburg. Entschuldigung, bitte.

Max Bruning (Email) - 12 October '09 - 17:06

Nice work guys!
this is just Amazing!
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