Hi Jeremy,
I've been studying the page scanner since my introduction to Solaris last year, and yes, it's old. :) I'm glad to hear some of you folks are looking to replace it, in fact i was hoping to learn how to write code to replace it. I'm looking forward to any writeups you might have on the design.
This will be a fun an interesting area to work on. I have plans to setup a VM community page in the near future, and to start posting our documentation up there for folks to read up on what we're doing.
Currently inside Sun we're focusing more on page cache replacement algorithms since most Solaris systems run cache-constrained rather than memory-pressure-constrained (memory is cheap these days, and admins don't like the DoS that comes from servers starting to page). Folks who want to contribute to better page replacement algorithms for paging should be able to find ample opportunity to contribute.
On a related note: if external developers are interested in rewriting/enhancing core parts of the kernel, eg. the VM, how does one go around co-ordinating with Sun folks? Do they 1) Code first, then post asking for integration? Or 2) Post first, and wait for people in the know to chime in? Obviously nothing prevents external developers from maintaining forks, but I believe that most people don't want to go down that path.
You've taken the first step by letting us know you're interested! (Sometimes hacking on the kernel we can feel like we're the only ones in the world who actually find this stuff fun! :))
When the community is set up there will be plenty of opportunity to share research, post pointers to papers, etc. and in general share ideas. In this type of work coding is 10% and 90% is in the design, so plenty of early discussion would be most productive. As things progress I can forsee folks posting prototype code.
Our current development code is based on infrastructure from a bigger Solaris project so it won't be easy to share code at this point but when we take a break from hacking to write up where we are we'd love to get feedback.
- Eric _______________________________________________ opensolaris-code mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/opensolaris-code
