Hi, This week in Beijing, Sun held an OpenSolaris Internals Workshop for a group of 25 Computer Science professors from various universities within China. The main purpose of the workshop was to give the professors enough of an introduction to the internals of the system so that they can start teaching OpenSolaris in their operating systems courses. The workshop covered various topics within the OS using the source code and the observability tools available within Solaris. Solaris has long had observability tools (notably mdb/kmdb), and, with the addition of dtrace and the source code, OpenSolaris becomes an excellent platform for teaching operating system concepts.
Of course, if students are learning Solaris in their OS courses, they will be more likely to do development work with Solaris, which in turn should increase the number of applications, drivers, and other tools which run on Solaris. This is an approach that should also work elsewhere (the US, Europe, etc.). Several of the professors are planning on using OpenSolaris starting in the spring because of what they have learned from this workshop. I also believe that this workshop would benefit developers who wish to learn Solaris internals, but who are not affiliated with a university. To this end, I plan on offering the workshop to such developers, starting in February or March of 2006. The material for the workshop will be made available to the professors (as well as anyone else who has an interest) via the web. In addition, the entire workshop has been recorded on video. The video will also be made available. Joey Guo, Manager, University Programs, of Sun China Engineering & Research Institute has an introduction blog at http://blogs.sun.com/joeyguo. Based on feedback from the professors attending the seminar, I think the workshop has been a pro-active measure that will do much towards getting Solaris taught in classrooms. John Jiang and Joey Guo have booth been key in getting the workshop organized, and helping during the delivery. Any comments/suggestions are appreciated. max
