updated 22nd June @ 01:52 EDT
I've had an incredibly busy year so far, having spent the better part of half of it on-site with a customer/partner across the atlantic, and it's only March. In addition to working with them on a large scale deployment proof-of-concept project (I'll blog more about that when I'm sure it's ok to blog about it), we've been hard at work on our Ecelerity 2.1 release, which is just about out-the-door (just some final QA to go).
One of the internals features in our new release is the adoption of the Solaris slab memory allocator, libumem. We already had our own slab allocator, but there are some interesting innovations in libumem that reduce lock contention and cache invalidations that make it attractive for a very high performance multi-threaded application like Ecelerity.
Wez Furlong in
Solaris Windows.
Sun's commercial grade compiler is now available for free on Linux (RHEL and SuSE) and Solaris platforms.
It will be interesting to see how the use of this takes off with the various OpenSource projects; the Sun compiler is pretty good, and should have some nice optimizations on AMD architectures (Sun's new favourite).
Wez Furlong in
Solaris.
I added two new probe parameters to the dtrace module; they don't do anything useful with PHP 4, but if you're running PHP 5, they add the classname (arg3) and a scoping operator (arg4) (either "::", "->" or "") that are filled in when making a call to an object or a static call to a class.
This means that you can use the concatentation of arg3, arg4 and arg0 (in that order) for the full name of the method or function being called.
Wez Furlong in
PHP Solaris.
Friday evening I sat down and wrote my first piece of solaris kernel code and an associated user-space application that activates the brightness up/down hotkeys for the LCD on my Toshiba Satellite M30.
I implemented a tosh_hci driver that can perform Toshiba Hardware Configuration Interface traps via an ioctl(2). This driver is really simple; the hardest part being the intel assembly needed to perform the trap (technically an inb instruction, not a trap).
Wez Furlong in
Solaris.
[Updated: just wanted to point out that Solaris 10 is free]
One of the things that Theo and myself have been salivating over at OmniTI recently is this really cool tool on Solaris (and OpenSolaris) called DTrace.
Wez Furlong in
PHP Solaris.
Wez Furlong is Director of Engineering at Message Systems where he works on the fastest MTA on Earth.
Wez is a PHP Core developer and active OpenSource contributor. He currently resides in Sykesville, Maryland with his wife, son, and dog. (read more)
Subscribe.
(circulation 804)
Comments.
(circulation 7)
