BOSTON - Solaris Internals class, by the guys who wrote the book.

Tons and tons of material on how paging, swapping, scanning, vm, filesystems all work. We covered dtrace in depth, even though it is a Solaris 10 feature only. It looks to be a useful tool, and provides good summaries of information so you aren't swamped with the output.

dtrace has its own scripting language "D".

There appears to be quite a burr in Sun's blanket, and it is called Linux. Apparently, any system feature or process that takes longer on Linux (on comparable gear, of course) is treated and prioritized internally as a bug. Substantial work has gone into lightening and streamlining system calls to speed up operation. Sun's also done work on speeding up the boot and shutdown processes. Perhaps they can shed the name "Slowlaris"?

Sun apparently has new religion (yes, again... sigh) about Solaris on x86. We'll see if it lasts. Here is their marketing. I'd say that this emphasis is also somehow based on the impact of Linux in their markets. Given their past, seemingly random commitments to Linux and their longtime lack of a real x86 strategy, it appears they have hunkered down with their workhorse, Solaris, and decided to make it beat Linux on Intel. This may be a solid strategy, given the emergence of 64-bit processors for the Intel world.

I'll probably add some more details to this later, since it seems I've left my course book up in the room.

Attended a BoF held by these guys. I didn't even stay for my free cert. How terribly unprepared they are for the real world.

It may seem like a good idea to issue certs to avoid giving money to VeriSign, but the CACert guys have totally missed the point on the trust model. They had many snide comments about browser vendors and flip answers about their own ability to get their certs included in the major web browsers. They won't last. You read it here first.

Killer dinner downtown, although they were sold out of lobster!