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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