Recent Posts by Martin Mueller

The Solaris Image Packaging system ("IPS") is the software distribution and lifecycle framework designed to distribute the Solaris operating system with all its userland and kernel components. It is of course not restricted to just operating system packages, it can be (and is already) used to change system configuration or install 3rd party software. In this article I do want to walk you through how to set up a very minimal package repository server to serve as a sandbox for...

Consolidation of different workloads often involves the use of virtualization technologies and/or partitioning of a physical server platform. Scenarios that involve partitioning sometimes result in under utilized hardware because of a too coarse granularity in compute resources. A single core might already be much more than the workload running on it needs. The same issue only seldom arises in memory assignments, the majority of partitioning technologies allow memory...

Some time ago I published an article on monitoring DAX activity on SPARC M8 (and to a certain degree the whole article also applies to SPARC M7 or S7) This article better had preceded the article on the DAX as it targets the SPARC M8 core. The goal is to give you a better understanding of the plethora of performance relevant events that a SPARC M8 CPU can measure or count. Like all SPARC CPUs (and Intel CPU have similar event counters) SPARC M8 provides a lot of information...

  After July 2020 you will not get any more LSUs (Limited Support Updates) for Solaris 11.3, so it is time to move to Solaris 11.4. If this is old news to you you can safely stop reading this article, we have stated that publicly e. g. in MOS doc 2382427.1 The LSU releases were never an equivalent to the SRU (Support Repository Update) releases we continue to provide, they always were ports of just a subset of fixes to Solaris 11.4. The only intent to offer the LSU train was to...

Today we bring a video to you that shows an advanced use case for our WebUI. It recorded one part of the Hands-on-Lab we offered at Oracle Openworld in San Francisco this year.  Solaris StatsStore's WebUI has been described as the easy to use interface to various kinds of performance and status information Solaris can collect. Having a graphical representation of well-known data like average CPU utilization, or disk I/O, or network load is what very many other tools can...

  HOL4974: Pulling Analytics Data from Oracle Solaris Through the REST API (Moscone West, Room 3023, Monday 09/16, 1pm-2pm) At this year's Oracle Openworld the Solaris Product Management will host a Hands-on-Lab (HOL) that brings together a lot of innovations Oracle has recently added to its portfolio: we will demonstrate the fastest CPU, the SPARC M8 with its Software in Silicon extensions, Oracle Solaris 11.4 and the Oracle Solaris Analytics/WebUI load and performance...

Oracle Solaris Sessions at Oracle Openworld 2019 This year Oracle Openworld will take place from Monday, Sep. 16 to Wednesday, Sep. 19 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, and like in previous years many sessions will cover Oracle Solaris topics. Oracle Solaris will also be covered in a hands-on lab session on the first day in the afternoon, where we will demonstrate how to use REST to gather information about an Oracle Solaris instance Here is a list of these sessions,...

Building OpenJDK Java Releases on Oracle Solaris/SPARC Starting with Java SE 8, Oracle created the concept of Long-Term-Support (LTS) releases, which are expected to be used and supported for an extended amount of time and for production purposes. Oracle Java SE 8 and Java SE 11 are LTS releases and are available and supported for Oracle Solaris - subject to licensing and support requirements detailed here https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris/update-on-oracle-java-on-oracle-solaris...

A lot has already been published on the Software in Silicon innovations in the recent SPARC M8, S7 and M7 CPUs. A large part of these innovations are implemented by a small dedicated unit on these CPUs called the DAX. The DAX itself can accelerate four basic operations, namely "scan", search for occurrences of a certain  bit pattern in memory "select", pick chunks of data from a memory area "translate", apply a simple translation table to a region in memory (used in processing...