A sneak peek: Solaris 10 10/08
The newest update release of Solaris 10(10/08 which implicates the general available date is this October) is just around the corner. Although Solaris 10 update releases mainly focus on bug fixing and supporting new systems, I believe some people will still feel exciting about the features added into this release. Let's take a quick look at it and see what new features we will have this time.
ZFS boot and root is one of the long-awaited features for Solaris 10. Now, Solaris 10 can boot from and use ZFS as the root file system, just like OpenSolaris. I'm pretty sure that we will see more exciting features being incorporated into Solaris 10 from OpenSolaris community. Apart from this, system administrators must be pleased to see other enhancements such as “zfs send”. It helps to transfer the file system from master to slave, and we can do it incrementally.
Like always, there’s new system supports come with this latest release. If you have not heard about the huge efforts that Sun has put on the collaboration with Intel, here’s evidence - Solaris 10 adds the support to the latest Intel Xeon processors 7400 Series. It also provides better performance and availability on Xeon. It supports Intel NUMA, Intel SSSE3/4.1/4.2 as well as Fault Management on Xeon. Sun doesn’t forget another “major” player in the x64 market(and once upon a time, Sun’s exclusive partner in the area). This release also supports AMD SSSE4 and provides Fault Management on AMD64.
Solaris 10 10/08 also includes virtualization enhancements. A feature called “update on attach” enables Solaris Container to automatically update its environment when moved from one system to another. And when S10 is used as a guest OS in Xen-based hypervisors, it can now support paravirtualization.
Well, enough talking. Just wait for another several weeks to play with all these cool stuffs.
Update: s10 10/08 is available now.
Huh; interesting.
Can you explain a little bit more about this "update on attach" feature? Like, how would I use it? What would I use it for? It sounds interesting, but I want to know a little more about how it works.
Posted by George Drapeau on October 15, 2008 at 05:27 AM GMT+08:00 #
Good question, George. People may want to move containers between hosts for consolidation reasons. Before this feature, a container has to be updated together with the global zone. This could be a lot of work when you have many zones to migrate. Now we can use the new option, -u, with 'zoneadm attach'. When the zone is attached to a new host, the zone dependent packages/patches will be updated to the same(higher) version of the new host.
Posted by Jie Shen on October 17, 2008 at 12:21 PM GMT+08:00 #