Solaris 10 code often uses a data structure called nvpairs (or nvlists),including all throughout the ZFS code, even in the kernel. There doesn'tseem to be a good overview of the libnvpair library, and since I've justspent the past couple of weeks up to my elbows in the OpenSolaris ZFScodebase it seems like a good time to write down what I've learned aboutnvlists and nvpairs before I forget it.

The basic overview is that an nvlist is a list, possibly nested

Since I've been poking around in this area of CPython lately, here's some triviaassociated with frame objects.

First, one might wonder if code executing at the module level literallyhas a CPython frame struct with f_locals being the same as f_globals , or if the C code just leaves f_locals null and fixesthings up behind the scenes when you look from Python code. Theanswer turns out to be that CPython frame structures always havea real f_locals (Python) dictionary