Update: moved code to http://bitbucket.org/wez/toshutils/

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).

The userspace code is a really slimmed down version of the code that I previously made available in my patch to the linux acpid. It currently only handles the LCD brightness keys because none of the features that the other hotkeys are supposed to invoke are currently supported by solaris/opensolaris.

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This article discusses some virtualization options in OpenSolaris. I was hoping to find a "silver bullet" solution for all my needs. I didn't, but it's not too far off.

We have quite a large support matrix for our software; 12 primary OS and architectures, with 4 major installation options. We test those as fresh installs, upgrades, upgrades from the previous major version and uninstalls.

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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.

Since Solaris is OpenSourced under the CDDL, we were able to incorporate the allocator into Ecelerity and port it to Linux and Windows and not be forced to open-up our entire source-code. The CDDL requires that we publish the code that we modified, so we set up a project on SourceForge. The code isn't out-of-the-box usable just yet, as it lacks its own configure script and makefile, but it won't take much effort to create those.

Thanks Sun for opening up such good quality code under a commercial software friendly license!

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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).

In other Solaris news, Intel Pro Wireless 2100 and 2200 chipsets are now supported on OpenSolaris, in addition to Atheros, which has been around for a little bit longer. I have the latter in my laptop and it works flawlessley.

In other-other Solaris news, Oracle announces that Solaris 10 is its preferred platform again.

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.

I can probably fill in those things for PHP 4, but I didn't have the time to do that yet; I pushed this release because I'm likely to get too busy to do it otherwise :)

I also refined the build process very slightly; if you're running on 64-bit, you should have better luck.

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[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.

DTrace is one of those tools that makes you wonder how you did anything without it before you'd heard of it. What is it? You can think of it as being something like strace that's been exposed to ultimate steroid mix during its conception. Why is it better than strace and similar tools? It's non-invasive, fast, scriptable and extensible.

So, why am I posting about it here? I had the great pleasure of sitting down with Bryan Cantrill, (Solaris kernel developer and one of the guys behind dtrace--a very animated, funny, smart guy) at OSCON, and produced a dtrace provider for PHP.

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