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.
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