Then life became busy and insane (partly because he was writing a book, but not only), and we didn’t shoot anything at all for months. And then, finally, the book was finished.
Many months after that, when the book was finally in print, we launched it at a meetup of BayLISA, where Brendan gave a long talk on all of it, with in-depth look at Chapter 6: CPUs.
The book is also available from Informitin paper, ebook, or a bundle of both!
“It’s a conversation between technologists, not between a company and a customer” – great talk @DiedreS#monktoberfest — Heather Huffman (@hhaustin) October 3, 2013
Enjoying @DeirdreS using a Hollywood metaphor for the relationship between companies and “talent” at #monktoberfest. — Justin Sheehy (@justinsheehy) October 3, 2013
“I’m not talking about taking marketing VPs and turning them into stars, I’m talking about actual talent” @DeirdreS at #monktoberfest
For over 30 years, hard drives have designated the smallest storage location as 512 bytes. In January 2011, all major hard drive manufactures began shipping their hard drive platforms using a new standard called Advanced Format. To aid in the transition, these new hard drives provide a 512 byte emulation mode that allows the drives to advertise themselves as a 512 byte addressable devices. This can severely impact write performance resulting in the need for read-modify-write operations for any misaligned or partial writes that are issued.
The problem is not limited to just physical hardware. Other storage platforms may also provide LUNs (logical unit number) that presents themselves as a 512 byte addressable devices when, in fact, they use a 4K sector size internally. Although ZFS has built-in support for 4K sectors, it has no automatic way of dealing with the lies that the storage devices tell. This talk will focus on the methods that have been developed to work around the lies that hard drive storage platforms tell and will discuss the challenges and drawbacks that come with using 4K sectors.
As sponsors of the SC09 Broader Engagement initiative, and because we gave such a great party last year, we were asked to sponsor a party again this year for students attending SC09. For a number of reasons we weren’t able to commit to this until the last minute, so thanks to Tiki Suarez-Brown and Tony Baylis of the Broader Engagement program for their patience and considerable effort in making sure this took place.
Because it was so last-minute, this year’s party was much more low-key than last year’s, but seems to have been appreciated by the ~250 students and educators who attended. They arrived around 7 pm after a full day of other activities, and were mostly glad to relax, eat a good dinner, and chat.
Everyone who attended had the option to fill in a brief survey in return for an OpenSolaris t-shirt and the chance to win an iPod in a drawing later in the evening. No one minded doing the “work” – we used up almost all of the 250 surveys we had printed.
For entertainment, we had two rented Nintendo Wii systems, which many enjoyed.
The event was also an opportunity for Sun folks to meet and talk with students and educators (potential future collaborators and colleagues!). The Sun folks introduced themselves from a small stage at the end of the room, and, as last year, stayed busy all evening conversing with our guests.
Above, Sun’s Josh Simon’s plays Wii archery with students. As you can see, some people put on their OpenSolaris t-shirts immediately.
