Friday, June 17, 2005

OpenSolaris Again

Today, I installed "Solaris Express: Community Release, Build 16" on a
VMWare guest.

Here are some notes.

* OpenSolaris doesn't recognize SCSI cards available in VMWare environment.
* OpenSolaris requires about 8GB of disk space for the entier distribution installation. :(
* The build 16 doesn't contain the language disk, and StarOffice displayed messages written in Chinese. :o

Tuesday, June 14, 2005

Ether Fabric


June 24, 2005

I didn't know Etherfabric to date.

According to the Ether Fabric web page, especially a paragraph titled
"Binary Software Compatibility", they insist on that Ether Fabric
doesn't require any new protocol software. But, other paragraph titled
"How Ether Fabric Operates" says all socket and MPI operations invoke
functions in a special library of Ether Fabric.

In short, that looks like a hardware (and perhaps software assisted)
implementation of TCP/IP invoked from the user space. If this is
correct, I don't think EtherFabric can be a competitor of InfiniBand
nor iWARP. It's just like an yet another TOE. They need to care about
overall costs especially from a view point of the relationship between
socket API semantics and system bus workloads. (In this sense,
asynchronous operations of MPI could be improved efficiently.)

OpenSolaris

Finally OpenSolaris was released.

When SUN made Solaris8 source code public, many important files were
missing. I hope this time we can see enough files.