Each of the last few Solaris Nevada builds has had some issue or another which tripped it up, and we never managed to get a May SX release out the door (we were also pretty swamped preparing for OpenSolaris). Happily, today marks the release of Solaris Express 06/05 (or Nevada Build 15). Get it at the usual place.

To be clear, the Solaris Express release is a tested intermediate release intended as a preview of new functionality. This is slightly less bleeding edge than what you'll find in OpenSolaris (and this is not the same as the OpenSolaris Community Express, which is Build 16), but not by much. The difference is that the official SX releases are managed to a reasonable quality level, and come with release notes, docs, etc.

Wow, this is a massive upgrade. We've got major new functionality in pretty much all corners of the product.

This is also the first Express release which goes to eleven. In other words, typing uname -r now yields 5.11.

Notable New Features in Solaris "Nevada", Build 15 (06/2005)

New Boot

• The "new boot" x86 boot architecture arrives, deleting the swilly old realmode drivers, the old loader, and the old ACPI stack. The new architecture uses GNU GRUB, the Intel ACPI intepreter, and doesn't need realmode drivers. Boot should work on a wider array of devices, including USB drives (assuming BIOS support).
• The stupid black-text-on-white is gone, replaced by a much more eye-friendly white-on-black.
• bootadm(1m) and installgrub(1m) were added.

Desktop

(please note that most of this is stolen out of Alan's 'blog. You can go there for all of the details)

• Better defaults for halt/shutdown/reboot commands for gdm2
• login screen changes for 1400x1050 screens
• X.org nv and 810 drivers get updated
• Virtual Keyboard and Mouse support: Multiple Keyboards and Mice simultaneously! Hooray!
• xgamma, xrandr, xvidtune and xvinfo support in the X client libraries.

Performance

• The Large Page OOB (or Out-Of-the-Box) project means that large pages will be automatically supplied to applications based on segment sizes, alignment and TLBs. On my laptop, Xsun, metacity, vncviewer, and other processes immediately began useing large heap pages!
• Large Pages for Kernel Memory (LP Kmem) is employed on sun4u platforms; this means that kernel dynamically allocated memory will be located on large pages when possible, meaning a lower overall TLB footprint.
• 64-bit division on AMD-64 platforms is now about 50% faster.
• Kernel bignum now uses a SPARC optimized version, and RSA in the kernel is now about twice as fast.
• The e1000g (Intel Gigabit) driver gets a lot faster on AMD64 systems due to some bug fixing.
• Large page support has been added for executables, libraries, and files.

Observability

• DTrace now shows probe argument types and stability when you use dtrace -lv. Hooray! I'm really happy to have this.
• DTrace now supports more sophisticated string handling via strchr(), strrchr(), strstr() and strtok(), substr(), index() and rindex().
• Zones now provide very precise error messaging about mount problems which prevent zones from booting, a source of trouble for some users.
• pmap(1) is a lot less disruptive to the process being examined.
• Kernel stack traces on x86 (for example, in MDB) are much more reliably found and accurately printed.
• ::findleaks now works even when kmem debugging is turned off. So you can check whether your production systems are leaking memory (although tracking down the leaks will be much more challenging).

Networking

• The "Nemo" project, aka GLDv3 project has integrated. BGE (broadcom) has been migrated to use the framework. GLDv3 enables dynamic switching between polled and interrupt modes (meaning higher performance), link aggregation (i.e. trunking), proper VLAN support, and other goodies. Administration is enabled via the dladm(1m) command.
• xge(7d), Neterion's 10GB nic driver, was also migrated to use the Nemo framework.
• The bge (Broadcom) driver is extended to support BCM5721, BCM5751, and HP ML370 G4.
• INADDR_NONE is added as a constant in <netinet/in.h>.
• Support for MLDv2 and IGMPv3.
• Support for the TCP_CORK option.

Storage

• This is cool: metasync(1m) operations can now be cancelled and resumed later, via the new -c option.
• rmformat now supports devices > 1TB in size. rmformat -l now lists additional media information.
• The NFS kstat client statistics nfs:0:nfs_client now include NFSv4 activity.
• Support in sd(7d) for >2TB luns. On x86, support for > 65535 cylinders is implemented for disks with VTOCs (so, up to 1TB). Larger disks are supported with EFI labels.
• Support in UFS and in lseek(2) for skipping past the holes in files which are holey.
• vold support for hot removal and insertion of devices. You shouldn't need to restart vold on hot insert/remove of devices anymore! Hooray!
• EMC Clariion Storage is now supported by MPxIO multipathing.

Other

• Door interfaces (doors are a very fast IPC mechanism in Solaris) have been revised. See door_setparam(3c) and door_getparam(3c).
• auditd(1m) has been migrated to an SMF service.
• nForce4 audio should now work.
• The Nvidia ck8-04 (nge) NIC is now supported.
• Sendmail gets an upgrade to 8.13.4, and support for TLS.
• ipmitool upgraded to 1.8.0
• Webmin upgraded to 1.200
• Samba upgraded to 3.0.11

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(2005-06-21 01:02:26.0) Permalink Comments [4]
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