I got chastised for not blogging often enough! I’ll try to do more in the coming month.
For now, Solaris Express 3/2005 is just around the corner (I believe it will come out
tomorrow, 3/29/2005); here’s a rundown on what’s new.

Notable New Features in Solaris “Nevada”, Build 9 (03/2005)

Desktop

• New “Never Print Banner” option in the Solaris Print Manager.

Hardware support

• MPxIO (Solaris’s Multipath I/O feature) compatibility problems with
  IBM FAStT900 and FAStT600 arrays have been corrected.

• A significant bug, 5042195 “Only part of disk is usable by fdisk or
  format on Solaris X86” has been fixed.

• CD-ROM/DVD DMA is now always enabled; this had in the past caused
  problems with some CDROM and DVD drives. However, the performance
  benefit is significant. CD/DVD DMA can still be switched off via the
  configuration assistant. This is also known to cause problems
  with encrypted DVDs; to fix, disable DMA; this should be fixed when
  snv_11 comes out.

Security

• A new command, embedded_su(1M) allows an application
  to prompt for credentials and
  execute commands as the super user or another user using su(1M) as
  a backend. This makes it easy (easier) to develop non setuid GUIs
  which invoke privileged actions. Cool!

Performance

• rand_r(3c), rand(3c) and pthread_once(3c) are faster.
  malloc(3c) and free(3c) are slightly faster.

Developer Support

• The libc atomic_ops(3c) have been expanded.
  See atomic_cas(3c), atomic_bits(3c), atomic_swap(3c)
  and membar_ops(3c).
  These are great for writing tricky code which maintains portability across ISAs.
  Thanks to Jonathan for pointing out that
  I forgot to mention this.

• The kernel gets a suite of handy atomic data manipulation routines,
  similar to those provided by atomic_ops(3c) (including all the new
  routines highlighted above). See atomic_ops(9F),
  atomic_bits(9F), etc. (but note a bug in the man pages: kernel code
  must #include <sys/atomic.h>, not <atomic.h>).

• plockstat(1m) and lockstat(1m) pick up some new options. plockstat
  gains “-e ” (limit elapsed tracing time), “-n ” (limit
  entries printed in output), and “-v” (print a message to indicate
  that tracing has started). Both commands acquire a “-x ”
  option, which enables further tuning by setting various DTrace
  tunables.

Networking

• The Network Layer 7 Cache (NL7C) revises the kernel NCA (Network Cache
  and Accelerator) by moving NCA’s HTTP layer and object
  cache into the kernel’s socket layer. Previously, NCA provided a
  completely separate TCP/IP stack inside the kernel, in order
  to provide the highest possible performance for web servers which
  were NCA-enabled. With the development of the FireEngine TCP/IP
  stack in Solaris 10, this extra TCP/IP stack can now be expunged.
  NL7C also further improves upon NCA performance by providing lower
  first-byte latency.
  Prefetch for sendfilev(3ext) is also added. Applications
  which already use the NCA apis are supported without modification.
  NL7C provides a framework for accelerating other L7 protocols in the future.

• dhcpsvc.conf(4) and the dhcpmgr(1M) gui have a new “Owner IP” option.
  This allows you to optionally specify which IP address “owns” the
  dhcp network records a Solaris DHCP server manages. This is used
  by the server to determine which dhcp_network(4) records it is
  allowed to allocate. This feature is especially useful in cases where
  the DHCP server needs to be moved temporarily to a different system
  or address, and also in cases where the server may not have a stable
  IP address.

• TCP and UDP ephemeral port selection is now randomized; this uses a
  high quality random number source in the kernel, raising the difficulty
  level of forging a valid RST.

Other

• New "poolbind -e" option allows one to easily run a command,
  binding that command to the resource pool in question.