Notable New Features in Solaris "Nevada", Build 17 (07/2005)

Desktop Support

• The AGPgart driver is integrated, providing greater graphics compatibility for Xorg. This feature improves support for memoryless graphics devices or devices which need to use system memory for video buffers (like Intel 810/830/855). Additionally, video drivers will be able to use AGPgart for 2D and 3D graphics acceleration.
• MESA support on x86 systems brings OpenGL support to a wide variety of Graphics hardware. Yay!
• Mozilla security advisories through MFSA 2005-42 have been fixed.
• dtlogin, dtconfig(1) and other CDE services have been converted to SMF:

  	svc:/application/graphical-login/dtlogin (dtlogin daemon)
  	svc:/application/dtprintinfo             (dtprintinfo service)
  	svc:/network/dtspc                       (CDE Subprocess Control)
  	svc:/network/rpc/calendar-manager        (Calendar Manager)
  	svc:/network/rpc/ttdbserver              (ToolTalk)
  

Security

• Various cryptographic operations are faster. rc4 is faster on SPARC (more than 2x) [4925453]. SHA1 and MD5 should also be slightly faster [6264344].
• The sha2 kernel provider has been added, providing support for SHA256, SHA384, SHA512 [6181926].

Observability

• The NFS server now sets paths on its vnodes, meaning that you'll be more easily able to observe pathnames when using the DTrace I/O provider. [6175304]
• prtconf picks up a handy -b option for displaying the "product name" of a system, when available.
• dtrace now provides the fds[] array, a new stable DTrace variable which is defined as an array of fileinfo_t's indexed by integer. [6267695] Mike describes all of the details in his blog.
• new ls -S option to sort files by file size. [6262450]

Device Driver Interfaces

• The "Advanced DDI Interrupt Interface" was added (actually it's in 6/2005 but I missed it). Anish has all of the details on the new APIs, but in short, a new DDI inteface family is provided which has the following features:
  • Supports new interrupt types like Message Signaled Interrupts (MSIs)
  • Supports new interfaces for priority management, get/set interrupt capability, get interrupt pending info, set/clear interrupt mask
  • Supports new I/O bus technologies like PCI-Express
  • Introduces a generic framework that can support other new (and unknown) interrupt types where possible
  • Supports multiple interrupts by a single device/function
  • Maintains source and binary compatibility for existing DDI compliant leaf drivers
  • Provides handle-based interrupt interfaces, which are more DDI compliant

Miscellaneous

• MPxIO interoperability with certain devices (including Engenio 2882,4884,5884) has been improved. [6254876]
• lex now outputs code less hostile to modern compilers [6267482]
• i.manifest and r.manifest are provided to ease the addition and removal of SMF manifests in packaging. [6209178]
• Lots of bugfixing and polishing around the "New Boot" architecture on x86. If you haven't upgraded to snv_15+, it's time!

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