[oi-dev] Support OI and illumos for GSoC 2012

[Bayard Bell]

Folks,

First off, if you haven't already heard, illumos has been accepted to
participate in GSoC 2012:

http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/org/google/gsoc2012/illumos

OpenIndiana is participating under the illumos umbrella. If you are a
graduate or undergraduate student interested in operating system
development and related topics (networking, virtualization, storage,
instrumentation), I'd encourage you to get involved and consider
applying.

One thing that we need to help expose students to OI and illumos is
virtual appliances. VirtualBox has proven to be effectively unusable
(building from source takes days instead of hours, and debug kernels
suffer awful performance and lockups). A lot of the students we've
seen are running on laptops without an immediate option to run off
bare metal and not enough internet access to use hosted solutions, so
we need to provide simple ways for them to run virtualized. There are
two obvious options: one is running under Linux KVM, and the other is
providing VMWare appliances with a fresh install of 151 prestable.

If you've got some experience with KVM, it would be much appreciated
if people could provide blog posts and mail links to for aggregation
and/or work on a common page on the illumos or OI wiki documenting
what's known to work. Both of these can subsequently be turned into
formal documentation--what we need right now is a bit more sharing and
circulation of what people are already doing.

If you have a copy of VMWare, it would be much appreciated if you
could contact me directly and/or join the oi-dev mailing list and work
with us to provide an appliance distribution. The latter's not
difficult, but the development team has so much else on at the moment
that we really need someone to step up for this.

Cheers,
Bayard