Trantorian Gazette

First fix in the OpenSolaris Sustaining gate

Thursday Jun 05, 2008

As you probably know, Sun is now offering support for the OpenSolaris distribution. This means that critical bug fixes will be made in versions of packages that can be installed on prior releases of OpenSolaris. That mechanism is coming online right now, and I was the first person to integrate a fix into the newly created source tree for the 2008.05 release of OpenSolaris. I can't tell you just yet what the fix is, because it is a critical security related fix, and we have to co-ordinate the release of the info about the bug and the binary fix itself for all supported releases in order to avoid the "zero-day" effect.

Let me tell you, making co-ordinated fixes like this is a lot of work. I had to create the fix for this bug for six (6!) different releases simultaneously. We have to have all the patches, packages and the SunAlert all ready to go at the same time. Phew!

[3] Comments
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Posted at 02:15PM Jun 05, 2008 by blu in OpenSolaris
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"This means that critical bug fixes will be made in versions of packages that can be installed on prior releases of OpenSolaris."

What about eventual libC incompatibilities, how do you plan to handle those?

Posted by UX-admin on June 06, 2008 at 03:42 AM EDT #

The plan is that for customers that desire a more stable platform, we will take a snapshot every 6 months, and then do the backport of critical fixes to that snapshot and release them in a separate repository for contract customers. These customers will not get updated packages from the regular OpenSolaris repository, just the contract one. That way, they will be insulated from the potentially radical changes in the regular repository while still remaining secure. So nothing will change for these customers and there will not be any incompatibilities, except at long, planned intervals when a particular snapshot is de-supported. This is expected to happen after 18 months of support for a particular snapshot. All details are subject to change of course as I am not involved in any of these decisions.

Posted by Brian Utterback on June 06, 2008 at 08:10 AM EDT #

Thanks for the answer.

With Sun Cluster now being available for OpenSolaris, and coupled with security fixes, OpenSolaris just might become a viable platform for some very restricted scenarios.

Posted by UX-admin on June 09, 2008 at 08:14 AM EDT #

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