OpenSolaris underway

Ben at Cuddletech points to all the relevant info you’ll need to make sense of Sun’s open sourcing of the DTrace code today. I think it’s a nice gesture, and certainly shows that Sun is serious about opening the whole of Solaris up — there’s no doubt that DTrace is one of the crown jewels of Solaris 10. I spent the last 2 hours looking over some of the code. It’s top notch. Right up there with some of the best C code I’ve seen. Excellent data structures, clean consistent coding style, and it’s well commented. Just good stuff. If the rest of Solaris is anywhere near as well coded as this, OpenSolaris could wind up being great place for someone to get their feet wet with UNIX kernel programming. One of Sun’s first tasks should be to get OpenSolaris into university computer science cirriculums.

The big question that continues to lurk in the back of my mind is how the relationship between the commercial Solaris releases and OpenSolaris will play out. Where will they diverge? How will they be kept in sync? Will future Solaris releases look something like FreeBSD or Darwin’s model where a code freeze it put on the OpenSolaris tree in preperation for rolling a “release”? It’s gonna be interesting.