OSDL's future in China
A recent posting from a ZDNet Asia colleague got me wondering about the state of Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) in China. My friend and BLUG member, Xia Fang, who is OSDL's manager of strategic relations, assured me that "at this stage it has not affected China yet". The word YET has me wondering WHEN, however he continued by saying "...as you know OSDL is migrating its current activities such as work group to new structure, the details will be determined by the end of next January. Perhaps it may cause some change of regional activities".
I guess we will have to find out more in February, and I hope to be the first one to update our ZDNet Asia readers ;). As for OSDL in China, Xia is the only staff in China and he is tasked with accelerating and helping Chinese open source related organizations, companies and individual developers to take part in global open source promotion and development activities, especially OSDL activities. Recruitment of Chinese companies to OSDL is another large task, but he is primarily tasked with the duty to execute OSDL's activity plan in China.
OSDL has seven members in China. They are collaborating with the Chinese government to promote some open source related projects, with the aim of making these projects a part of global development efforts. Last year they hosted OSDL joint Face to Face meetings in Beijing, which provided a good opportunity to Chinese companies to communicate with global industry leaders. Also they are planning a developer seminar in Beijing, which will be a periodic event.
Along with our e-mail dialogue, Xia Fang sent me a recent OSDL press release, giving an idea of the changes going on at OSDL.
OSDL and other Linux kernel contributors have released Linux serviceability improvements including new kdump and SystemTap features which are available in most major distro's by now. These changes will offer the following benefits:
"The kdump enhancements are expected to improve the ability to reliably and quickly create crash dumps that can be analyzed offline, while new SystemTap features will improve debugging and performance analysis of production systems...The SystemTap improvements give IT managers, system administrators and developers the ability to debug a running system in a real-time environment. With the latest improvements, SystemTap's features have surpassed similar tools by adding the capability to debug production systems without performance degradation or recompiling. Other new features include easy to understand rich scripting language, safety built in for production systems, and system level performance analysis and debugging.
The improvements are the result of a community effort facilitated by OSDL with contributions from Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP, IBM, Intel, NEC, Novell, NTT, Red Hat, and VA Linux."