Today marks the release of Solaris Express 10/05 (or Nevada Build 23).
Here’s a breakdown. Among other things, about 600 bugs were fixed.

Notable New Features in Solaris “Nevada”, Build 23 (10/2005)

Desktop Technologies

• StarOffice 7 and StarSuite 7 are updated to Product Update 5
• Mozilla is patched up through MFSA 2005-55

For Developers

• GNU autoconf, Fortran 77 and gdb are now bundled with the system as
  /usr/sfw/bin/autoconf, /usr/sfw/bin/g77 and
  /usr/sfw/bin/gdb.

• Medialib is
  now v2.3, and now includes 64-bit SSE2 libraries for AMD64, as well as
  new functions for transparency, alpha blending, signal functions for normalized
  LMS filtering, vector/matrix averaging functions, and normalized cross
  correlation functions for images. 342 new functions were added in all.

System Enhancements

• fsck_ufs has been enhanced to more accurately report error messages and
  suggest the next course of action, and a ‘-o v’ for verbose output
  has been added. fsck will now also automatically search for superblock
  backups in the event that it needs them; you may now see:

  LOOK FOR ALTERNATE SUPERBLOCKS?
  

• A new pam_allow PAM module has been added. pam_allow
  returns
  PAM_SUCCESS for all calls. It’s the opposite of pam_deny(5).
  This can be useful for allowing an automatic login for a kiosk, or for allowing
  anonymous sftp. BUG 6305906
• The vacation(1) filtering facility can now also accept negated
  entries. This means that you can now have .vacation.filter files
  such as:

  !host.subdomain.sun.com
  sun.com
  !wife@mydomain.com
  mydomain.com
  onefriend@hisisp.com
  anotherfriend@herisp.com
  

• SVM’s default interlace and resync buffer sizes are increased, which
  should improve resync performance
• volfs(5d) (i.e. vold) can now support “no media” nodes– in other words, it
  will display device nodes for empty media, allowing utilities like cdrw(1)
  to see them:

  /vol/dev/aliases/cdrom0 ->  /vol/dev/rdsk/c2t2d0/nomedia
  

Hardware Support

• SMBIOS support has been added to Solaris. Mike Shapiro
  has all the
  details.
  • A new smbios(1m) command which prints the smbios configuration
    was added
  • prtdiag is now available on x86 and x64 systems:

    # prtdiag
    System Configuration: Sun Microsystems Sun Fire B100x
    BIOS Configuration: Phoenix 0.24        08/05/2003
    ==== Processor Sockets ====================================
    Version                          Location Tag
    -------------------------------- --------------------------
    AMD Athlon(tm) pr                Socket A
    ...
    

• A number of ACPI improvements were made, and code was updated to
  Intel’s 20050708 code drop.
  [6277768]
  [6283818]
  [6284164]
  [6286008]
  [6294226]
  [6300079]
• The onboard audio on Dell Optiplex GX280’s should now work.
• The lsimega driver picks up support for the PERC 4e/Si, PERC 4e/Di,
  PERC 4e/DC and MegaRAID 320-2e adapters.
• Compatibility with Adaptec SATA RAID adapters is improved
  [6289318]

• The e1000g (Intel Gigabit) driver has been overhauled:
  • It was migrated to the Nemo (GLDv3) driver framework. This means users
    of these cards pick up the advanced features offered by the Nemo framework:
    link aggregation, vlans, etc.
  • e1000g is now supported on SPARC (hooray!!)
    [6242612]
  • The driver now supports link up/down notifications, making its
    integration with IP Multipathing more complete.
    [6207682]
  • The driver can now employ the card’s onboard H/W checksum offload facility
    if it is available, resulting in improved performance (in some tests as much as
    30% better throughput).
• The system now detects CPUs affected by AMD Opteron Errata 131. If
  affected by this, you will see a message instructing you to update
  your BIOS.

OpenSolaris Related Activity

• We’ve made big strides in our effort to clean up the source code to be
  cleanly compilable using gcc. In this release we’ve got 125 more bugs
  worth of gcc cleanup taken care of. That means we’re getting close.
  From looking in the bug database, it looks like we’ve blown past the
  halfway mark in getting this massive task completed.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Technorati Tag: Solaris