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 | Posted by: ironfist on Friday, September 16, 2005 - 17:09
Submitted by ironfist |
| | | | Kristian (Ironfist) and Mikael (Lisardman) from Pegasos.org visited Sun Microsystems in Kista outside Stockholm earlier this week to attend the first Swedish OpenSolaris meeting. Thanks to Genesi for sponsoring the trip we took the car and drove some 500 km across Sweden...
Click 'Read more'
We started early so we checked in to our hotel before driving to Sweden's Silicon Valley. We checked out our rooms, dropped off our bags. After some fifteen minutes we went back to the car and drove to Sun. It was hard to miss their large sign on top of their building. Microsoft sure looked pale in comparison. Microsoft is a part of an office complex. Sun, however, have their own building on top of a hill.
Mikael standing outside of Sun building
Lars Tunkrans, Europen.se member of the board, started the meeting by showing off OpenSolaris running KDE 3.4 on his shiny new Athlon64 Acer Ferrari. Lars works on Fujitsu and has been using Solaris and UNIX for many years.
Lars with his Athlon64 laptop
After the introduction Kjell Högström, OS Ambassador at Sun, began his presentation of the new TCP/IP-stack in Solaris 10. The stack has got a major overhaul and is running much better and much faster than the Solaris 9 version. It consumes much less CPU and has less latency. The stack needs no tweeking as the previous versions have. The latest stack supports the new 10 GigE standard and was used to set a new land speed record over Internet2 with 14 gigabits per second, using two 10 Gigabit network interfaces.
IPFilter has also been improved. The calculated performance raise with NEMO is 25% on Solaris/x86 and 20% on Solaris/SPARC. One way to get it faster was to use less interrupts and go straight to action.
Performance in Web traffic:
1 Gbit consumed 8% of the CPU on a single 2.2 GHz Opteron.
10 Gbit (7.3 Gbit) on a dual 2.2 GHz Opteron consumed less than 50% of the CPU. It only reached 7.3 Gbit due to PCI-X limitations. Pre-Solaris 10 would need several machines to reach this speed according to Kjell Högström.
After the TCP/IP-stack presentation Kjell head over to OpenSolaris. There are currently three major OpenSolaris projects. The first is the Sun-sanctioned OpenSolaris.org, then an x86 OpenSolaris Live-CD called Schilix. Polaris is the third and aims towards to the PowerPC architecture. This development is done on Genesi Open Desktop Workstations.
OpenSolaris has been put under a new software license called CDDL ("CuDDLe"). It is based on the Mozilla-license. In short this license grants mixing open source code with closed source code. It is OK to distribute compiled code under a different license. The reason for not using GPL is that many parts of Solaris is still closed due to various agreements and patents used. Sun simply cannot open up everything. This new license has been approved at OSI - The Open Source Initiative.
After Kjell Högströms interesting presentation Lars Tunkrans entered the stage and showed us how easy it is to install OpenSolaris. Basically you need to install Solaris 10 first, download pre-compiled binaries or source code of the OpenSolaris kernel and tools, then unpack or compile. There are documentations on how to do it.
We took a short break for submarines and soda. After the break we discussed future Swedish OpenSolaris meetings. We agreed to two meetings per semester - four per year and there will be one more meeting before Christmas. The meetings can be held at Sun.
Sun Microsystems presented new servers and workstations this week and we had a chance to see them in action. The server was a 2U Dual-Opteron Sun Fire x4200 eqipped with two hot-swappable 2.5" SAS drives. The workstation was a Sun Ultra 20. It was single CPU and equipped with one 3.5" SATA drive.
Kjell showing off the new machines
Sun Ultra 20 Workstation
Sun Fire x4200
Me and Mikael are both happy with this trip. About thirty or fourty attendants showed up to the meeting. Thumbs up Lars and Kjell!
More pictures here
A note on picture quality; The batteries in my digital camera died after a few photos so I had to take the rest with my cell phone. The image quality isn't the greatest..
Kristian E.
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