Today marks the release of Solaris Express 4/06 (or Nevada Build 36).
I missed blogging about 3/06, and I feel guilty.

Anyway, you can look at the 3/06 What’s
New Doc for a summary of 3/06, so I’ll just pretend I wasn’t a slacker
last month.

Among other things, about 750 bugs were fixed.

Notable New Features in Solaris “Nevada”, Build 36 (SX 4/2006)

Observability

• The DTrace JNI binding project integrated. This means that you can
  now control DTrace from Java programs; the author, Tom Erickson, has
  subsequently released Chime,
  a client program which uses this facility.

Storage

• ZFS persistent offline was added; this changes the behavior of
  zfs offline to persist across reboot. offline -t is
  available as a “temporary” offline.

• ls -V was introduced, which provides a new ACL display mode to ls
  which is more compatible with NFSv4/ZFS ACLs. This produces ACLs in a compact
  format, which some users prefer.
• Disk write caches are enabled if ZFS owns the disk. [6322205]
• The fsstat utility was added, providing vfs-level observability.
• The ZFS FMA Phase 1 project integrated, bringing a sophisticated approach
  to I/O fault handling to the system. Eric wrote a nice blog
  entry about this.

• zfs mountroot phase 1 was implemented, which allows you to hand-assemble
  a system which boots from ZFS. See Tabriz’s Blog for details.

• The .zfs/ feature of ZFS is now supported over NFSv3 (it was supported over NFSv4 already).

Misc

• Zone migration was added; this allows you to safely move a zone (halted,
  not running) from one system to another. For more details, take a look
  at the
  design document. [5022513]
• The event ports bug reported here
  as well as some others were fixed.
  [6357796]
  [6358194]
  [6362390]
  [6367349]
  [6374407]
  [6362558]
• The ASET subsystem was removed. [6368327].
• mkdtemp(3C) and mkstemps(3C) were added. [6386057]

Performance

• libumem now uses significantly less memory on some workloads.
  Jonathan wrote a nice blog
  entry about this. [6304072]

• getrusage() is now faster. [6381512]

Platform

• FMA for Athlon 64 and Opteron Processors was integrated. This
  brings sophisticated error telemetry and diagnosis to Opteron and
  Athlon 64 systems of all shapes and sizes (not just those made by Sun).
  Here are the highlights:
  • CPU & Memory error detection
  • ChipKill is on by default
  • Offlining of CPUs and Cores
  • Memory retire

  All of this should add up to additional improvements in the uptime of
  Opteron and Athlon systems running Solaris.

• Hotplug support for PCI Express was added; the front-end for this is the cfgadm command.
• Hotpluggable drives are now better able to accomodate EFI-labels and
  device IDs, both of which are very important to supporting ZFS on USB
  and Firewire disk drives. [6348407]

• It’s now possible to offline CPU 0 on x86 systems, a long standing
  annoyance. [6342823]

• The AMD64 kernel now emulates two Intel-invented instructions, lahf
  and sahf. [6219321]

• A closed-source disassembler for x86 was purged from the system and
  replaced with open code.

• An audio driver for the ATI IXP400 chip was added.
• The Intel ACPI interpreter was updated to 20060217.

Free Software

• PostreSQL has been integrated and is available in /usr/bin
• Samba has been converted to an SMF service:
  svc:/network/samba:default [6310561]

• Samba is now compiled with LDAP support. [6174211]
• Apache has been updated to 2.0.55.

Desktop

• The “Coolstart” project has landed. See Jan’s
  Blog Entry for more information about how to turn on fancy boot-time graphics.
  CDE, JDS, dtlogin and gdm have all been reskinned to match. (dtlogin in
  particular looks really nice now).

• dtlogin and the various CDE daemons have been converted to SMF
  services: svc:/application/graphical-login/cde-login,
  svc:/network/cde-spc, svc:/network/rpc/cde-calendar-manager,
  and svc:/network/rpc/cde-ttdbserver
• Fixes to the USB mouse driver mean better compatibility with the latest
  mice [5083593] [6328758]
• A video driver for the AST 2000 chip was added to XSun.
• The OpenGL vendor switching project was integrated. The goal here is
  to allow multiple different implementations of OpenGL to co-exist on a
  machine at one time, and provide boot time selection of the best implementation
  for the hardware present. man -M /usr/X11/man ogl-select for details.

• Font handling in JDS was improved. [5099951]
• Xorg now works properly if the system has no mouse connected. [6245431]
• ATI mach64 driver performance has been significantly improved. [6303855]
• Xorg auto-configuration has been improved to more accurately detect
  monitor characteristics. [6385111]

Community Contributions

• Juergen Keil contributed:

  [6368142] sd: unaligned write memory corruption; zfs on dvdram media: panic
  [6311025] build_reserved_irqlist ignores irq15 information from ELCR register
  [6372009] dma_mem_alloc failures when free memory is low; zfs panic on usb mass storage
  [6388096] NULL pointer dereference panic in sd_range_lock()
  

• Rich Lowe contributed:

  PSARC 2006/134 logadm(1m) $zonename keyword
  [4823583] crontab command prints incorrect usage
  [6352485] RFE: add $zonename to the list of macros supported by logadm
  [6357132] DHCP server should not open /dev/ip
  [4844685] gratuitous "in.ndpd: terminated" printed during shutdown.
  

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

Technorati Tag: Solaris