….because I’m not contracting any more – I’m a Sun employee again. It’ll take a little while to propagate through the various systems, but once that’s done I won’t have that darned “C” in front of my id. Joy! .. image:: /images/smilies/icon_smile.gif

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:-)

I might even post an entry from b.s.c from time to time as well.I’m very happy to be back as an employee, and I’m really glad that I’m staying with the group I’ve been working with for the last 10 months – they’re a fantastic bunch of engineers and it’s a real pleasure to work with them.BTW: Note for anybody looking at my profile on LinkedIn: LinkedIn won’t acknowledge that timezones exist, so it won’t let me update my profile to be correct. I think I’ll have to wait until 00:01 on the 1st of September US/Pacific

I was reading the comments for this story on OSNews about some alleged Linux Driver Copyright Violation. It made me quite annoyed on two levels – firstly, that a “news” site which aspires to have some degree of journalistic integrity jumped off the deep end by posting the link to the claim, and secondly that people who I’m fairly sure are knowledgeable software developers preferred to rant in public about second-hand information rather than go to the source and find out for sure.Misinformation, FUD and raised blood pressure…. sounds like just another day in the Free vs Open software battleground. I’m sick of all this licensing argument, it gets in the way of engineering software and solutions which people can use.

While talking on #opensolaris this morning, I had a need to go and find the list of patches which are applicable for the Studio 11 compiler suite. After much searching (I wasn’t particularly focused on it, probably due to a lack of caffeine), I found the page I was looking for here.Remember that if you want to build OpenSolaris you’ll need to have the compilers patched to match the info in the README – scroll down to “Installing from source” and look at section 2.`Technorati`_ tags: topic:{Technorati}[OpenSolaris], topic:{Technorati}[Sun Studio Compilers], topic:{Technorati}[Studio 11], topic:{Technorati}[SUNWspro], topic:{Technorati}[sunsolve].

The Update CTeam Review didn’t go quite as smoothly as I’d hoped, and we’ve got a bunch of AIs to follow up on. I don’t think we will have to have another meeting in order to get everything ticked off. I’m also not sure which build we’ll get into. I really wish we’d been able to get into Update 4.

In a matter of a few hours our team will be meeting with the Solaris 10 Update CTeam for a review of our backport.I’ve been driving this (generating IDRs, filling in the paperwork etc), and two minutes ago I just hit “send” on the email to send the final review materials off to the CTeam’s alias.I’m nervous, more nervous than I ever was when I took part in the NWSC CTeam! I know we’re well prepared, but there’s still that nervousness which I can’t quite get rid of.

Yesterday we finally got our act together to connect our 4KL water tank to the Onga TF30 pump that was delivered last week. Courtesy of come connectors and 20m of 3/4″ polypipe from TradeLink, as well as another 3m of polypipe from Bunnings we managed to bring the level up by about half of what we needed in around an hour. Not a spectacular fill rate, but not too bad either.And of course it started raining about half an hour after we turned off the pump at 1pm…. the rain is still going, tank is now more than half full again, and Archerfield AWS has had 32++mm since 0900 yesterday morning.It’s certainly not the drought-breaking rain we need, but it’s been long and steady and gentle so with any luck if the predicted heavy falls happen on Wednesday then that rain at least should go into the dams.W000t!**Update, 10am**: the pool is now more full than when we took possession of the property at the start of July – the rainfall since 1pm is now more than 3.5cm. We might even have to let some out at this rate!

A long-running project under the leadership of Roland Mainz in the OpenSolaris community has been the integration of ksh93 into the ON consolidation. I’m ecstatic to note that (courtesy of April) this project was putback into snv_72 on the weekend. (The logfile should be here in a few days). April sent a flag day message about it. With the integration, this marks the closure of phase #1 for ksh93 integration as covered by`Korn Shell 93 Integration – PSARC/2006/550`_/etc/ksh.kshrc for ksh93 – PSARC/2006/587 and`ksh93 Amendments – PSARC/2007/035`_Roll on phase 2!`Technorati`_ tags: topic:{Technorati}[ksh93], topic:{Technorati}[Roland Mainz], topic:{Technorati}[OpenSolaris], topic:{Technorati}[PSARC]

Just saw the putback notification from Marty, and the associated heads up message from Prasad about the putback of the Native SATA driver for nVidia CK804 and MCP55 chipsets.I’ve been waiting on this for quite some time now, and I’m eagerly awaiting the release of iso images for snv_72 which have it before I upgrade my main system and get my zones fixed up.Come to think of it, I guess I should probably go and find me a beefy LTO2/3 to backup everything first.`Technorati`_ tags: topic:{Technorati}[OpenSolaris], topic:{Technorati}[Solaris], topic:{Technorati}[nVidia], topic:{Technorati}[CK804], topic:{Technorati}[MCP55], topic:{Technorati}[SATA], topic:{Technorati}[nv_sata]

There was discussion on ogb-discuss overnight about the signal to noise ratio on opensolaris-discuss, and suggestions about how to improve that ratio.The first step was taken by Alan Burlison, who put together this page entitled Installing OpenSolaris.There are links to the OpenSolaris help forum, to installation FAQs, to the Genunix wiki, and to the documentation community. It’s a great jumping off point for your OpenSolaris voyage and I heartily recommend it. There’s also the #opensolaris irc channel on irc.freenode.net if you want some real-time contact.`Technorati`_ tags: topic:{Technorati}[OpenSolaris], topic:{Technorati}[Newcomers], topic:{Technorati}[Sun Microsystems], topic:{Technorati}[Installation], topic:{Technorati}[irc.freenode.net], topic:{Technorati}[Alan Burlison], topic:{Technorati}[ogb-discuss], topic:{Technorati}[OpenSolaris Governing Board]

Wandering in to #opensolaris on irc.freenode.net this morning, DLG pointed me to two urls:

. http://www.sun.com/processors/documentation.html. http://www.sun.com/processors/manuals/Fire_Reference_Manual.pdf

This is great news, because this documentation is the sort of programmer’s reference manual which you need if you want to write a nexus driver for those chips. Now of course, these nexus drivers are already there in OpenSolaris, but they’re not there for OpenBSD. DLG has been corresponding with David Yen and Jonathan Schwartz for a number of months on getting this doco without strings (ie, no nda required), and I’m really happy that this has worked out.There’s nothing there yet for the Schizo chip, but I’m optimistic that this will turn up too, soon enough.`Technorati`_ tags: topic:{Technorati}[David Gwynne], topic:{Technorati}[OpenBSD], topic:{Technorati}[Fire ASIC], topic:{Technorati}[Tomatillo], topic:{Technorati}[Theo de Raadt], topic:{Technorati}[David Yen], topic:{Technorati}[Jonathan Schwartz], topic:{Technorati}[Sun Microelectronics], topic:{Technorati}[OpenSPARC], topic:{Technorati}[Sun Microsystems], topic:{Technorati}[nexus driver]