Notable New Features in Solaris "Nevada", Build 21 (09/2005)

System Enhancements

• MDB on AMD64 picks up the ability to print out function arguments when they are available, improving debuggability. [6290893]
• ustackdepth has been added to DTrace, enabling you to discover the depth of the stack. This enables fun queries like: what's the deepest stack trace which makes a system call?:

  dtrace -n 'syscall:::entry/ustackdepth>maxdepth/{maxdepth=ustackdepth;
      printf("maxdepth=%d", ustackdepth); ustack(100);}'
  

  [4970475]
• 'intrd' arrives. intrd is a daemon which evaluates whether or not interrupts on the system are properly balanced between CPUs. If needed, intrd reassigns interrupts from CPU to CPU. [5017144]
• Install has been enhanced to find non-Solaris OS's and add them to the GRUB boot menu automatically. [6275698]
• The dladm(1m) utility, new in build 15 (6/2005), has undergone some revisions. The create-vlan, delete-vlan, init-link and up-link subcommands have been removed (all of the functionality remains but is now more automated).

Desktop

• vold, the volume management subsystem is now properly managed by SMF. This means you can issue svcadm disable svc:/system/filesystem/volfs:default to disable it if you wish, and it will then stay disabled until you next enable it. [6178604]
• A pesky mozilla bug which caused various javascript math functions to work improperly on Solaris x86 (an endianness bug) has been fixed; this means that maps.google.com's satellite imagery (as well as a slew of javascript calculators) now works properly. Thanks to Blake Jones (at Sun) and his pals at Google who debugged this problem. [6258444]
• Xorg gets a variety of updates including the ATI driver and the nv driver; the i810 driver should work properly again. [6290756] [6301351] [6302138]
• Freetype is upgraded to 2.1.10. [6258444]

OpenSolaris Related Activity

• Shawn Walker contributed the following bug fixes:

  [6269165] misleading comments in usr/src/cmd/stat/iostat/iostat.c
  [6286482] remove the only occurrence of "shit" in OpenSolaris
  [6231501] Typo in <sys/fem.h>
  [6249704] exstr fails to close file descriptor
  [4763952] fstyp_ufs misreports cylinder group offsets
  [6301610] lint errors in fstyp_ufs
  

• Jeremy Teo contributed the following bug fix:

  [4997138] pn_free() should free pn_bufsize bytes
  

  Thanks guys!

• We continue to make good progress in cleaning up the source code to be cleanly compilable using gcc. In this release we've got 83 more bugs worth of gcc cleanup taken care of. It'll probably be a couple of more months before we're completely done.

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