Solaris & NetBackup versions 6.0/6.5 Enterprise Server and Server

Solaris 8, 9 and 10 for SPARC are supported for NetBackup as a Client or Server. They are also supported for NetBackup Bare Metal Restore (BMR) NetBackup Operations Manager (NOM).

Solaris x86 is supported with NetBackup 6.5, which was released in August of 2007, as a Server or Client. That means that the Sun Fire x4600 server (Thumper) can be used as a Media Server for Symantec Veritas NetBackup.

In this diagram, the Netbackup master Server(s) use the x4500, the Media Server, as the primary cache for staging operations. The tape library can be attached directly to the 4500 (SCSI or FC) or the library can be connected to another media server.

Utilizing all four of the built in Gigabit ethernet ports and ZFS, it's possible to deliver close to 350 MB/Sec. of backup throughput.

Innovations At Sun

In its recent 168-page 2007 Annual Report, Sun lists some innovations that it believes to be significant enough to highlight to its investors:

UltraSPARC T2

UltraSPARC T2 (Niagara 2) Chip Unveiled

Sun Streaming System

New Video-based Services Can Increase Subscriber Revenue with Sun Streaming System

Sun Blade 6000 Modular System

Versatile Sun Blade 6000 Modular System Runs on AMD, Intel or SPARC Processors

Solaris 10 -- Solaris Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) technology

DTrace Wins Technology Innovation Gold Award

JavaFX Script

New Scripting Language JavaFX Script Simplifies Content Authoring

Initial design for fabrication of thr new "Rock" processor

Solaris 10 OS Successfully Booted on Rock Processor

Project BlackBox

Project Blackbox Has Its First Customer - Stanford University

Sun Fire X4500 ("thumper")

World's First Hybrid Data Server Sun Fire X4500 Server

ZFS File System

InfoWorld Awards NetBeans IDE and ZFS with 2007 Bossie Awards

The OpenOffice.org Wiki and Extension Repository

The OpenOffice Wiki has a lot of information for developers and users of OpenOffice and insight into the development community. There are links to wiki style documentation for OOo, links on how to develop extensions and links to the extensions community project.

The community has produced a number of extensions, including

• eFax for StarOffice and OpenOffice.org
• mOOo Impress Controller
• Sun Report Builder
• Writer's Tools
• Gallery - OxygenOffice Extras as Extension
• Templates - multilanguage - OxygenOffice Extras as Extension
• Quoots
• Sun Weblog Publisher

66 GFLOPS of sustained double precision matrix multiply (DGEMM)

This week ClearSpeed Technology's accelerator boards were add to Sun's price list.

"Our partnership with ClearSpeed means that we can offer even better and more efficient performance to our customers", Dr. Simon See, director of HPC Solutions - Systems Practice at Sun commented. "HPC is a major growth area and many of our clients will benefit from the addition of application acceleration technology to their data centers. Sun's expertise in system design, configuration, and support will bring ClearSpeed's technology to them in a low risk, energy-efficient solution."

"We are delighted to have been selected by Sun as part of their HPC strategy. To work with a world class vendor such as Sun to deliver low risk, accelerated systems to our key customers has always been our desire", said Tom Beese, ClearSpeed chief executive officer. “This is a clear demonstration of the value of our technology to the HPC markets and an opportunity to offer our products to customers within the wrapper of a well-respected and trusted brand."

ClearSpeed Advance™ X620 and e620 Accelerator Boards

The Advance X620 is a standard height, two-thirds length PCI-X board designed for new and existing systems whose architecture incorporates the PCI-X standard.
Building on the success of the Advance X620 and delivering the same computational performance, the Advance e620 is a complementary and smaller form factor PCIe based accelerator. It brings all the benefits of ClearSpeed’s acceleration technology to the latest generation of multi-core industry standard servers that incorporate the PCIe standard.

Sun SE Humor - Handle with Care

InfoWorld: Sun's newest server: Dynamite comes in small packages

InfoWorld has a new review of the Sun Blade 6000, "Sun's newest server: Dynamite comes in small packages":

Overall, however, testing across the three blade architectures showed solid performance at every level, and the quad-core Intel blades are obviously perfect for virtualization.

Storage with Smarts

A new Contrarian Minds article by Al Riske profiles Harriet Coverston, the chief architect of QFS, who is very excited to be working in "intelligent storage":

We're really making storage intelligent. What we're going to do is say, 'Write this to objects in the storage device.' The storage device then understands that the blocks in this object are related and it can act on that. It can do prefetching. It can do caching intelligently

Harriet co-founded LSC where she helped create SAM-FS, then QFS. Sun bought LSC in 2001.
"Redshift companies like Salesforce.com and Qualcom use QFS and SAM. They love it," says Harriet.

SAM-SF is a sophisticated multi-tier HSM which "provides data classification, centralized meta-data management, policy based data placement, protection, migration, long-term retention, and recovery to help organizations effectively manage and utilize data according to business requirements".

QFS is a distributed SAN files system which can deliver "nearly raw device access to information and data consolidation for read/write file sharing".

HBO uses QFS as an integral part of managing their SD and HD digital content.

These are great products that are not well known as they should be.

PostgreSQL for Solaris 10

PostgreSQL is a powerful, open source relational database system with more than 15 years of active development. Its SQL implementation strongly conforms to the ANSI-SQL 92/99 standards.
Sun has included PostgreSQL in Solaris 10 since the 6/06 release. Sun provides an 18-page "PostgreSQL How To" guide in PDF and HTML.

Table of contents for the How To guide:

1. PostgreSQL for Solaris: Overview
2. Starting PostgreSQL for the First Time
3. PostgreSQL Integration with Solaris Service Management Facility
4. Configuring and Running PostgreSQL in Solaris Zones
5. Installing PostgreSQL on Earlier Versions of Solaris 10
6. Package File Locations
7. Installing PostgreSQL for Solaris Packages
8. Installing Solaris Patches
9. Removing PostgreSQL for Solaris Packages
10. Summary
11. For More Information

PostgreSQL 8.1 is included in Solaris 10 8/07. PostgreSQL 8.2 is included in Solaris Express Developer Edition 9/07.

Binary downloads of PostgresSQL 8.2.3 are available from Blastwave.org.

See also,
"Overview of PostgreSQL in the OpenSolaris OS"
"EnterpriseDB to Provide PostgreSQL Support to Sun"
"Benchmark Result on Open Source GlassFish with Solaris OS"
Wikipedia entry, PostgreSQL

Update on Etude: The Solaris 8 Migration Assistant

Last week, the article, Etude: The Solaris 8 Migration Assistant, described how a project in development will allow legacy Solaris 8 application to run unmodified in a Solaris 8 branded zone under Solaris 10.

Dan Price, the project lead, just posted an update that describes the progress of the project and some details of what will be required to run a Solaris 8 container. Dan says, "I've done a dry run on a T1000, which looks like this:

• Install S10 8/07 onto the system (or into an LDOM (logical domain) on the system)
  
• Bring system to single user mode
  
• Add kernel patch using patchadd
• Reboot system (or LDOM)
  
• Add SUNWs8brandr and SUNWs8brandu packages to the system
• Configure a Solaris 8 container and install it from an existing system archive
• This will auto-apply any required Solaris 8 patches to the system
• Boot S8 zone, and enjoy!
  

It's nice to see the pieces coming together...".
I agree.

Ashlee Vance on New Sun Servers with Intel CPUs

Ashlee Vance who writes for "The Register" (aka "El Reg") from Silicon Valley, does a fine job. I always find his articles worth reading.
While watching the webcast of the recent Sun Launch of the new quad-core Intel Xeon based servers, it was good to see Ashlee jump up with the first question in the Q&A section. (John Fowler did a good job of answering that question.)

Ashlee's most recent article on the new Sun servers with Intel CPUs, "It's time to pay attention to Sun's x86 server biz", has the usual insightful quotes such as,

Without question, Sun now has the most attractive 2U server for those customers not afraid to spend a great deal on a server. That’s not to say Sun’s gear is that much more expensive than rivals. Instead, we’re talking about a 2U unit that can hold four of Intel’s highest-end, four-core chips and 32 sticks of FB-DIMMs. The tray of memory alone would prove a more than daunting expense for the average customer.

and

For Sun, the X4450 could be a bigger deal in that gives burly x86 customers a reason to check out what Sun has to offer across the board. For a company still just ramping up its x86 business, that’s a pretty big deal

Ashley's book, "Geek Silicon Valley: The Inside Guide to Palo Alto, Stanford, Menlo Park, Mountain View, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, San Jose, San Francisco", can be found on Amazon here.

Geek Silicon Valley contains rich profiles of the people and places that helped create such firms and has equally rich profiles on institutions like Stanford University, Lawrence Livermore National Lab and the Computer History Museum.

But wait, there's more.

You'll also find juicy information on historical landmarks, places to eat and ways to enjoy the great outdoors surrounding the Valley.

Ashley's Web site

Uniboard X-Options Available with 1.95GHz UltraSPARC IV+ Processors

Uniboard X-options with 1.95GHz UltraSPARC IV+ processors are now available for Sun Fire E4900, E6900, E20K and E25K servers. The UltraSPARC IV+ processor is a 64-bit processor that delivers over five times the throughput of UltraSPARC III technology and over two times increased throughput over UltraSPARC IV systems on commercial applications.

• Due to cooling requirements on the 1.95GHz UltraSPARC IV+ Uniboard, the Uniboard can only be half populated with memory (16 DIMMs maximum) for a total of 32 Gb
• A minimum firmware requirement of 5.20.4 is required to support the 1.95GHz UltraSPARC IV+ processors.
• Sun Fire servers with the UltraSPARC IV+ processors Solaris 9 9/05 or Solaris 10 3/05
• Solaris 8 OS is not supported with UltraSPARC IV+
• The 2900 has enough cooling to support 64GB per board with 1.95GHz CPUs

Podcast: Kichler Lighting, a Sun virtualization customer

Virtual Strategy Magazine has just posted a nice, short interview with a Sun customer who is using Solaris containers.

Podcast Summary:
Length: 12:55

• Introduction
• Mike Sink, Kichler Lighting, a Sun virtualization customer (:10)
• Description of Kichler Lighting and the role IT plays there (:22)
• Why Kichler chose to utilize virtualization (1:05)
• What it was like to add the Solaris platform to their existing IT environment (2:00)
• How including Sun virtualization changed their day to day work (3:45)
• What Kichler runs in their IT environment (5:40)
• How virtualization has helped eliminate downtime (7:50)
• New challenges they face in a virtualized environment (9:57)
• More information about Sun virtualization (12:00)

Webcast: Sun Introduces New Intel Based Servers

Executive Vice President for Sun's Systems Group, and Pat Gelsinger, Senior Vice President and General Manager for Intel's Digital Enterprise Group, unveiled the new Sun Fire systems based on the Quad-Core Intel Xeon processor on September the 25th, 2007.
A 43 minute video of thet launch is now available:


Fowler says that there are many areas in which Sun can apply it's design skills and innovate to create better products in a market which many people think is about commodities.

In 7 months, Sun has gone from development agreement with Intel to collaborate around Sun's software platform and hardware, to three Sun engineered and Sun designed products: the Sun Blade x6250 and the two servers announce today, the Sun Fire X4150 and the Sun Fire X4450.

Sun designs for the large improvements in performance - doubling CPU performance, i/o, memory etc. - that customers want. Sun believes that design is fundamentally one of the differentiators on how to develop core intellectual property in the systems infrastructure business.

In contract to HP, Dell and IBM, Sun is able to deliver the same basic capabilities in a box that is half the space. That required significant design engineering across many disciplines at Sun.

System management is included at no extra cost. Lights out management and serviceability features, such as RAID and hot-swappable redundant power supplies, fans and disks are of great value to customers small and large.

Sun and Intel are working together on Solaris on the Intel platform to take advantage of Intel and Solaris features to actually produce more reliable, higher performing and lower power using systems that if each company worked along.

Sun's New Quad Core Intel Xeon Based Servers - X4450, X4150

Sun has announced two new servers that feature the quad-core Intel Xeon 7200/7300 Series CPUs.

These servers support the Sun StorageTek PCI-E SAS RAID Host Bus Adapter (8 Port Internal, Includes Battery Backup Unit) as well as an integrated LSI 3081E Raid Controller.

Sun Fire X4450

• Two to four Dual-Core or Quad-Core Intel Xeon Processors
• Max 128GB of addressable memory through 32 available memory DIMM slots
• 4 independent Front Side Buses (FSB) operating at 1066 MT/s
• 8 internal disk drives, 4 GbE ports on-board, 6 PCI-Express slots, 5 USB 2.0 ports
• Embedded Lights Out Manager

SunFire X4150

• 1-2 Dual-Core or Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors
• Max 64GB of addressable memory through 16 available memory DIMM slots
• 2 independent Front Side Buses (FSB) operating at 1066 MT/s or 1333 MT/s
• 8 internal disk drives, 4 GbE ports on-board, 3 PCI-Express slots, 5 USB 2.0 ports
• Embedded Lights Out Manage

New Solaris 10 Installer

SXDE3 (Solaris Express Developers Edition v3 9/07) sports a nice, new graphical installation, designed to make it easy for the casual user to install Solaris. Considering the large numbers of downloads of Solaris 10 for non-Sun hardware, this is a long overdue improvement.

Sarah Jelinek has posted a few screenshots of the installer in action. Very nice.

Jan McGinn has posted an interview with Frank Ludolph, the Senior Interaction Designer responsible for greatly simplifying the user experience of installing and upgrading the Solaris operating system.

We decided to replace the old installer. The UI team reviewed a number of current operating system installers, both proprietary (Mac OS X and Windows) and open source (SUSE, Fedora, Ubuntu). We decided the goal of the installer should be to do minimal configuration during install; just enough to get you up and running following reboot.
....
Then Solaris Express Developer Edition (SXDE), a fast-moving project targeted at developers, appeared. This project had fewer functional requirements than on the full installer and allowed for a phased implementation of the installer.

Servers, Power and the Modern Datacenter

In, Building a data center circa 2007, Dan Farber & Larry Dignan talk about Jon Vander Hill who has built two data centers since 2000 and is on his third. Common DC design theme emerge:

• The revenge of Moore’s Law – you have to pay for the power consumption
• Hosted data center billing – real estate vs. power metering – expect to be charged for power consumption - it's no longer bundles with the rack space
  
• Cooling system are challenged. Look for innovations to deal with the different requirements of new, hotter systems
• Rack density & blades - demand more power per rack and better cooling
• Befriend your utility. novel business relationships with Data centers - who can be amongst the utilities largest consumers - are worth exploring

Sun had to consider all of these factors in the design of their new data center, described in an excellent muti-media tour.

Win4Solaris - Run Windows as a Guest Under Solaris

Win4Solaris, from Virtual Bridges, allows X86 users to run Windows and Windows apps on Solaris 10, Solaris Express 11, or OpenSolaris workstations. In conjunction with SunRays, this is quite an interesting solution. Have a look at the Thin Guy's blog entry to see a flash animation of Windows XP booting in a window then running apps.

ThinGuy also reports

w00t! Win4Solaris now has bridged networking. What does this mean? It means XP/W2K Desktop sessions running under Solaris can now do things like join a domain, run point to point applications (i.e NetMeeting which I'm testing I've tested and works), etc.

Win4Solaris Pro Desktop costs $149.99.

History

Solaris Express Developer Edition 9/07 Now available

The new version of SXDE (Solaris Express Developer Edition) 9/07 is now available on Sun's web site for downloading.


Key Features

For the Developer

• The latest developer tools are automatically installed during OS installation. These include:
  
• Sun Studio 12 C, C++ and Fortran compilers and NEW D-Light, a GUI DTrace tool that simplifies using DTrace
• NEW Glade 3 replaces Glade 2 for development of user interfaces for the GTK+ toolkit and GNOME desktop environment
• NEW Desktop Notification facility provides notification support through libnotify and a notification daemon on Solaris. This mechanism allows applications to notify users of some asynchronous event.
• NEW GNOME DevHelp, an application that enables you to browse and search GNOME API documentations. It works natively with gtk-doc.

Other packages of interest.

• PostgreSQL 8.2.4 With DTrace probes, and integrated with the Solaris Service Manager, Kerberos 5 support. PostgreSQL 8.1.8 is also included.
• Bcc 0.16.17, real mode x86 compiler NEW
• Flex 2.5.33, lexical analyser tool for generating programs that perform pattern-matching on text. UPDATED
• GNU Bison 2.3, general-purpose parser generator UPDATED
• GNU make 3.81, tool which controls the generation of executables and other non-source files of a program from the program's source files. UPDATED
• Tcl 8.4.14, dynamic programming language suitable for rapid development, cross-platform GUI's and flexible integration UPDATED
• Tk 8.4.14, Tk the standard GUI for Tcl, as well as other dynamic languages. UPDATED

Solaris OS

• Solaris (Solaris Express Community Edition build 70b) UPDATED

• NEW Solaris Installer- 3 clicks minimum to upgrade, 6 screens for full install. Automatic provisioning for the use of Solaris Live Upgrade if Solaris is given at least 20GB of disk.

Solaris Desktop Major Components

• GNOME 2.18 UPDATED
• Thunderbird 2.0 UPDATED

Administration

• Disk Usage Analyzer UPDATED
• Name is baobab. Contains new ring chart view.

• Nmap 4.20, Network Mapper NEW
• A utility for network exploration or security auditing.

For a more complete description of the new content is Solaris Express Developer Edition, see the What's New Guide.

Avoid backups with Automatic Multi-Tired NAS Solution

You can use the Sun StorageTek Storage Archive Manager to create network mount points that provides advanced "Tiered Storage" services to Windows (via SAMBA) and NFS clients.


Tim Thomas has a blog entry, "What Does Sun StorageTek Storage Archive Manager Do ?", that expand on this idea.

A file can be created in the "fast" disk area then copied, based on policy, to "cheap" disk then inexpensive tape. Files are always backed up so there is no need for backups.

Sun StorageTek 6540 Best-in-Class SPC-1 Performance and $/Performance

Sun reported that it outperformed IBM by over 2X in Price/Performance in SPC-1 benchmark:

System	SPC-1 IOPS	$/SPC-1 IOPS	ASU Capacity (GB)	TSC Price	Data Protect Level	Date	Result Id
Sun ST6540	46,491.72	$6.62	6890.000	$307,710	Mirroring	6/15/07	A00051
IBM DS4800	45,014.81	$16.03	6871.277	$721,618	Mirroring	4/12/07	A00050

The Storage Performance Council (SPC) a vendor-neutral, non-profit, standards body focused on the storage industry. It has created the first industry-standard performance benchmark targeted at the needs and concerns of the storage industry.


The full report shows:

Comparison of Sun Fire E25k and the Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000

A detailed blog posting by "Mr Benchmark" from the Sun Solution Center has a detailed comparison of Sun Fire E25k and the Sub SPARC Enterprise M9000.
Four benchmarks are used to compare the performance of these two large servers:

1. iGenCPU v3 - Fractal simulation 50% Integer / 50% floating point
   
2. iGenRAM v3 - Lotto simulation (Memory allocation and search)
   
3. iGenBATCH v2 - (Oracle 10g batch using partionning, triggers, stored procedures and sequences)
   
4. iGenOLTP v4 - (Heavy-weight OLTP)

Key Feature Comparisons:

Systems	E25k	M9000
Max processors	72	64
Max cores	144	128
Max HW threads	144	256
Max memory	1152 GB	2048 GB
Memory bandwidth	173 GB/s	737 GB/s
I/O bandwidth	36 GB/s	244 GB/s
Max internal disks	0	64
Max domains	18	24
OS support	Solaris 9 or 10	Solaris 10 U4
Media	None	DVD, DAT
Power type	1 phase	1 or 3 phase
Max Power	30.6 kW	42.6 kW

Top 10 Articles from "System News For Sun Users" Vol 115 Issue 2

Each week, we determine which articles have been most frequently referenced by logged-in subscribers to provide you with a list of the most popular articles for each of the last 4 issues.

Top Ten Articles for Vol 115 Issue 2

• Update Now Available: Solaris 10 8/07 OS [18625]
• New Sun Desktop Virtualization Software Improves Desktop Security and Ease of Management [18622]
• Sun to Acquire Cluster File Systems, Inc. [18623]
• What's new in the Solaris 10 8/07 OS Release [18597]
• Sun to Sell Microsoft Windows Server on Sun x64 Systems [18624]
• MPK20 - Sun's Virtual 3D Work Environment [18617]
• AMD Opteron Processor based Sun Blade Server Module X8440 [18621]
• Interview with Sun's Chief Security Officer Whitfield Diffie [18578]
• Manage Escalating Data Growth with the New Sun StorageTek 9985V System [18620]
• Sun Distinguished Engineer Brian Wong on High Semantic Storage [18619]

Top Article for Vol 115 Issue 1

• Quad-Core Intel Xeon Processor 7300 Series Platform Previewed [18608]

Top Article for Vol 114 Issue 5

• Sun Server Virtualization Technology [18520]

Top Article for Vol 114 Issue 4

• Transactional Memory in Sun's "Rock" processor [18516]

Detailed List

OpenOffice.org Writer vs. Microsoft Word,

In, "Office software shootout: OpenOffice.org Writer vs. Microsoft Word, round three", Bruce Byfield, a computer journalist who writes regularly for Linux.com and IT Manager's Journal, iinvestigates how OpenOffice.org Writer compares to Microsoft Word. Bruce judges OpenOffice.org Write (OOo Writer) to better than Microsoft Word in 8 of 14 categories:

OOo Writer Better:

• The Interfaces
  
• Styles
  
• Page layout
• Bulleted and numbered lists
  
• Headers and Footers
  
• Footnotes and endnotes
  
• Indexes, tables of content, and bibliographies
  
• Master documents
  

Tie:

• Tables
  
• Drawing tools
  

Microsoft Office Better:

• Templates
  
• Outlining
• Cross-references
  
• Unique features

Bruce concludes,

"As in the previous two comparisons, Writer emerged as the winner in the majority of categories. However, in many categories, the decision is not as obvious as in previous comparisons. For the first time in several releases, Word's designers seem to be making significant changes."

Less Than 2%of UK Companies Have Upgraded to Vista

Computer Business Review (CBR) reports that less than 2% of UK-based firms have already upgraded all their desktops to Windows Vista. "That was one of the findings of a new survey by CBR amongst 300 senior IT decision-makers in the UK, researched during September".

Ina Fried, a Staff Writer for CNET News.com, recently reported that, "While Microsoft is still pushing Vista hard, the company is quietly allowing PC makers to offer a "downgrade" option to buyers that get machines with the new operating system but want to switch to Windows XP."

I have talked with people at a number of firms who use large numbers of desktops and they are still one or two years away from a switch. I suspect Vista will only be adopted as Windows XP systems "age-out". where replacement systems come bundled with Vista. Allowing PC makers to offer "downgraded" may slow that down.

For many IT managers, the return on investment (ROI) case for upgrading XP desktops to Vista may be hard to make. Starting with a baseline of functionality with XP, they spend a lot of money on new Vista licenses and perhaps more money on upgrading the PC hardware and end up with a new Vista baseline that has similar functionality. All of those costs for a marginal improvement are hard to justify. I wonder how many managers will emphasis just how many problems they have with their current environment - which they are responsible for - to increase the value of the upgrade?

A different strategy could be to Virtualizing the PC desktop with the Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (Sun VDI) Software. Sun VDI offers users a highly-secure platform for accessing virtualized Microsoft Windows desktop environments from a wide variety of client devices. It can be installed on Solaris and Linux operating systems.

"New Sun Desktop Virtualization Software Improves Desktop Security and Ease of Management", says:

Sun previewed the Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure software at VMworld 2007 September 11-13 in San Francisco. They also previewed Project Appia, an integration of Sun VDI Software with VMware Infrastructure. New connectivity features utilize management interfaces available in VMware VI3 to administer virtual desktop life cycles while providing users access to their virtual desktops from nearly any modern client. Project Appia is planned for release in early 2008 as a component of Sun Virtual Desktop Solutions and will support VMware VI3 deployments, with others to follow.

Adding Vista into a managed VDI environment may be a better strategy to address desktop management while providing improved security and flexibility for users and IT managers.

Three Blog Entries by Dennis Clarke

Dennis has a few more blog entries of interest:

• IBM/Lotus Domino on ZFS
• "the ZFS filesystem that I used in my tests was compressed and the compressed ZFS was considerably faster than uncompressed ZFS."
• Joomla on Solaris coming along nicely
• "expect software packages from Blastwave as soon as we get it all together"
• cool tool report : Sun Device Detection Tool 1.1
• Sun Device Detection Tool can tell you in just a couple of minutes whether the Solaris OS supports the devices that are detected in your x86 system.
• Sun Device Detection Tool produces a table that shows whether a Solaris driver is available for each device the tool detects. The table tells you whether the driver is built in to the Solaris OS or whether a third-party driver is available. Sun Device Detection Tool enables you to save the driver report in html forma
• This java tools runs on many systems
• Fedora Linux (x86) Core 5
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4
• SUSE Linux 10.0
• Solaris 10 OS, x86
• Solaris Express OS, x86
• Ubuntu 6.10 x86
• Windows XP Home Edition
• Windows XP Professional Platform

Dennis Clarke of Blastwave.org praise Niagara II

Dennis posted this nice graphic:in his blog entry, "UltraSparc Niagara T2 released as the worldest fastest microprocessor".

'"cool" is too small a word sometimes' - Dennis Clarke

Solaris 8 Retirement - Phase 1

The last ship date (LSD) for Solaris 8 was 02/16/07. Sun's "Life Cycle Model for the Solaris Operating System" (above) shows that Retirement Phase 1 begins after the LSD. Retirement Phase 2 for Solaris 8 will begin on 3/31/09. End of Service Life (EOSL) will be 3/31/12

• During Retirement Phase 1 - 03/31/07 to 03/30/09 - Sun will provide contract customers full remedial support excepting requests for enhancements and cosmetic bugs. Patches will be created as needed and distributed through the SunSolve program. There is no material reduction in the level of support during this phase. However, patches will not be rolled up into quarterly updates.
  
  
• In Retirement Phase 2 - 3/31/09 to 3/31/12 - contract customers will continue to receive telephone support and will continue to have access to existing patches on the SunSolve site. No patches will be issued for new bugs.

The total service life of Solaris 8 will be slightly more than 12 years.

• Solaris 8 Transition Information
• Solaris 8 Transition FAQs

Solaris Performance ToolsCD 3.0 available online

Stefan Schneider has made the Solaris Performance ToolsCD 3.0 available online.

The CD covers within 300 MB:

• dimSTAT v8.1 - collect and analyze performance data

• Dtrace Tools - Brendan Gregg's collection of Dtrace scripts

• K9Toolkit - freeware tools written using the KStat library on a Solaris 9

• sysperfstat - displays utilization and saturation for CPU, memory, disk and network, all on one line.

• cpuinfo - displays CPU configuration (number, type, clock and strands)

• meminfo - displays configuration of physical memory and swap devices or files

• iobar - displays io for disk-devices in a |cpubar|-like fashion

• iotop - displays |iostat -x| in a |top|-like fashion

• checkcable - prints the link up status for network interfaces

• nicstat - prints statistics for the network interfaces such as KBytes/s read and write, Packets/s etc.

Stefan gives credit to Horst Leitner, the chief editor of this CD, and asks that feedback go to Horst.

Using raidctl in JumpStart pre-install script

Kevin Hodges has submitted a script to BigAdmin to set up the hardware raid controller on a T2000. The script uses raidctl(1m) to configure the integrated raid controller.

Kevin's example is for a T2000, but it could be modified for other servers such as the Sun Fire x4100.

John Fowler: Sun & Quad-Core Intel Xeon Processor 7300

"John Fowler, Sun's EVP of Systems, explains how thanks to Intel's Xeon 7300 series platform, Sun is able to build a new range of servers incorporating the best features of systems design, virtualization and systems management (1:32)"

See the video

Sun and GNU/Linux

In a recent (August 2007) LinuxWorld presentation, Barton George observes that Sun is the top contributor to GNU/Linux.

Barton includes a link that was supposed to go to the Gartner paper (Vendor Ratings: Sun) April 2007, which says,

Gartner has elevated Sun's Linux rating to "promising." In the past Sun's marketing messages and development efforts have been strongly skewed towards Solaris. More recently, however, Sun has become a notable provider of Red Had Linux (a substantial number of Sun's Opteron server shipments are deployed with Linux), and its substantial contributions to Linux and open source have been recognized.

Baton lists some of Sun's key software offerings on GNU/Linux:

• Java Enterprise System
• StarOffice/StarSuite Office Suite
• Sun Ray Server Software
• Sun Secure Global Desktop Software
• Developer Tools
• All Java technology offerings (DLJ)

And the Sun hardware that supports GNU/Linux:

• Sun X86 systems support for Linux
• Workstations
• Rackmount servers
• Enterprise blade servers
• ATCA system and blades
  

• Sun Storage line supports Linux
• Sun SPARC systems support Linux
  

xVM hosting Solaris, Windows XP and Windows Vista

Sun Blogger, rab, has posted a very interesting screenshot of Solaris xVM hosting three Operating Systems. In the screenshot, you can see 4 running Operating Systems:

• Solaris 10 Update 3
• Windows Vista
• Windows XP Professional
• Solaris 10 - the dom0
  

ZoneMgr

The OpenSolaris ZoneMgr project has the following goals:

• Simplify zones creation
• Simplify zones management
• Incorporate Solaris features into zone creation/management such as resource controls, minimization, service lockdown,…
• Incorporate external features such as network package repository based package installation.

It is not the project's goal replace the existing zonecfg/zoneadm commands but rather to supplement them.

OpenSolaris Project Page
56 slide Presentation (PDF) by Brad Diggs
Discuss Zones and the Zone Manager

Here's an example from Brad's presentation:

Add a zone and install multiple Blastwave packages:

zonemgr -a add -n m2 -z /zones -P pw -I "192.168.0.20|hme0|24|m2" \
-C /etc/nsswitch.conf \
-C /etc/resolv.conf \
-G mysql5 -G apache2 -G dss

Have a stiff drink before reviewing example 10 in the presentation.

What is OpenSolaris? A Definition

Stephen Lau, from Sun's OpenSolaris Engineering, has just posted his OpenSolaris presentation which he delivered at the Tech Days in Boston (Sept 11, 2007).

The OpenSolaris page for that event features the slides from 4 other presentations:

• What is Solaris Nevada
• OpenStorage for OpenSolaris
• OpenSolaris Networking for Developers
• Using and Contributing to Open High Availability Cluster

OpenOffice 2.3 Now Available

I just started the download of the new version of OpenOffice 2.3.

The press release, OpenOffice.org Releases New Version of Free Software Alternative to Microsoft Office, says that "OpenOffice.org 2.3 incorporates an extensive array of new features and enhancements to all its core components, and protects users from newly discovered security vulnerabilities."

Some of the key changes are:

• The Charting component has undergone a complete revamp
• Writer is better able to handle multi-lingual documents better
• New MediaWiki (Wikipedia) export filter
• Mail merge has some additional usability features.
• General productivity improvements have been made to Calc
• Performance improvements have been made to presentation tool, Impress
• A Report Builder is available as an extension to Base, OpenOffice.org's database application
• Draw has been enhanced to provide improved exporting to HTML/web by adding support for exporting the images to portable network graphics (PNG) format
• plus many more

118 Mb for the Windows version. Software - it gets bigger and better but mainly bigger.

There is a detailed "new features 2.3" wiki on openoffice.org

REGISTER reveals Niagara II Details

Charlie Demerjian has written a nice detailed look at the Niagara II for the REGISTER, Here's technical look at Niagara II.

Charlie says:

From the 10,000-foot view, it all looks quite familiar, but once you delve into the details, it quickly becomes apparent that almost everything has changed.

INQUIRER show 32 core, 256Gb RAM SunFire x4600

In the INQUIRER article, Sun outs monster Barcelona box, there are pictures of an X4600 M2 and a future product (4 socket, quad core, 2 RU server).

The X4600 M2 server has 8 memory sockets per CPU, while the "model 1" had just 4. With 8Gb DIMMs, that's a maximum of 32Gb per CPU, or a total of 256Gb for an 8 socket X4600!

Learn more about the shipping product in the 'System News' article, Dual-Core AMD Processor in Sun Fire X4600 M2 Server.

Solaris Features - from Solaris 7 to 10

The Solaris Operating System has evolved significantly since Solaris 7 was released almost 10 years ago. There's a nice page on Sun's web site that has a matrix of Solaris Release by Feature Category. The listed categories are:

• Data Management
• Install/Upgrade
• Networking/Interoperability
• Observability
• Performance
• Platform Choice
• Security
• Usability
• Virtualization

Dennis Clarke, from blastwave.org, told me recently that many of the pre-compiled FOSS packages downloaded and installed from blastwave.org are still for Solaris 8 and 9.

For those organizations that have not upgraded to Solaris 10, have a look at the matrix to see how much you are missing.

Top 10 Articles from Last Week's Issue of "System News For Sun Users"

Each week, we determine which articles have been most frequently referenced by logged-in subscribers to provide you with a list of the most popular articles for each of the last 4 issues.

Top Ten Articles for Vol 115 Issue 1

• Quad-Core Intel Xeon Processor 7300 Series Platform Previewed [18608]
• Sun Blogs on the Solaris OS: Tech Tips [18588]
• Sun Java System Identity Management Suite Gets Sun into Gartner Magic Quadrant for User Provisioning [18603]
• Project Indiana Aims to Attract More Developers to Solaris OS [18604]
• ServerWatch Highlights Sun's Latest Server Offerings [18530]
• OpenSolaris News from This Past Summer [18583]
• Sun Fire x64 Servers Management Pack 3.0 for Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 [18585]
• Sun Java System Directory Server Enterprise Edition 6.1 [18554]
• Using DTrace With Open MPI Applications [18600]
• New Course on Sun Java System Identity Manager Starts 9-17-07 [18596]

Top Article for Vol 114 Issue 4

• Transactional Memory in Sun's "Rock" processor [18516]

Top Article for Vol 114 Issue 3

• IBM To Distribute the Solaris Operating System [18517]

Top Article for Vol 114 Issue 2

• UltraSPARC T2 (Niagara 2) Chip Unveiled [18461]

Greg P: Why Microsoft Matters

In Why Microsoft Matters, Greg P says, "Microsoft matters because R&D matters." and

Our mantra has been "product interop", because at the end of the day, that's what our mutual customers care about. Pragmatically, we will both continue to innovate in our own ways, and continue to strive for differentiated products in the marketplace.

On Sun's Web site, Sun Interoperability - Sharing Across Platforms, there is a list of the areas in which Sun and Microsoft and worked on Interoperability:

• Interop Vendor Alliance
• Interoperability with Sun x64 Systems
• Interoperability in the Data Center
• Interoperability for the Client and Desktop
• Interoperability for the Developer
• Interoperability in Storage

xVM: Xen-based virtualization

Stephen Shankland reports that "Sun Microsystems, a longtime participant in the Xen open-source hypervisor project, has named its Solaris-based offshoot xVM, short for x86 Virtual Machine."

Marc Hamilton discussed that in a recent blog entry. "You can try out xVM today, via the OpenSolaris Xen community." In that same blog, Marc talks about dCache/SRM.

Patrick Fuhrmann1 for the dCache team, writes:

The core part of the dCache has proven to combine heterogeneous disk storage systems in the order of several hundred tera bytes and let its data repository appear under a single Filesystem tree. It takes care of data hot spots, failing hardware and makes sure, if congured, that at least a minimum number of copies of each dataset resides within the system to ensure full data availability in case of disk server maintainance or failure. Furthermore, dCache supports a large set of standard access protocols to the data repository and its namespace.

Marc Hamilton asserts, "Many dcache sites have already switched to Solaris so they can take advantage of the data integrity features of ZFS. When you are managing 15 petabytes of information, data integrity is important."

Using the UltraSPARC T2 hardware crypto features

Lawrence Spracklen has listed the 3 drivers that can be used to access the UltraSPARC T2 hardware crypto features:

1. ncp - similar to the UltraSPARC T1; handles RSA, DSA, DH and ECC
   (more details can be found here)
2. n2cp - handles bulk ciphers and hashes
   [more details can be found here (the supported modes of operation are also detailed)]
3. n2rng - access to the HW random number generator
   (more details can be found here )

Another "top new features" list

For Solaris 10 8/06, a Sun blogger lists these as the most important enhancements:

• Solaris Live Upgrade and Solaris Containers
• Improved integration of Resource Mgmt into Solaris 10 containers
• Solaris Containers for Linux Applications (BrandZ)
• IP Instances LAN and VLAN separation for Zones
• Packet Filtering Hook API/Firewalling for Solaris Zones
• DHCPv6 Client
• Quagga routing daemon
• Large Send Offload
• NEMO Enhancements (including Multi-MAC address support)
• IPsec Tunnel Reform
• IP Filter Update
• Key Management Framework
• Kerberos V5Protocol APIs Exposed
• PostgreSQL 8.2 for Solaris
• Improvements to ZFS file system
• Firefox 2.0 Browser and Thunderbird 2.0 Email client
• DTrace enhancements
• SMF Enhancements to Routing Management
• Predictive Self-Healing for PCI Express on x64 Systems
• SPARC CPU Power Management
• Scheduler enhancements for CMT processors
• iSCSI Target mode
• SIP Stack
• Single Hosts File
• Coherent Console
• Reliable Datagram Sockets (RDS)
• Service Tags

Solaris 10 8/07 Docs Available Now

The documents describing Solaris 10 8/07 are now available in docs.sun.com

Solaris 10 8/07 Release and Installation Collection

• Solaris Hardware Compatibility List
• Solaris 10 Sun Hardware Platform Guide
• Solaris 10 8/07 Installation Guide: Basic Installations
• Solaris 10 8/07 Installation Guide: Solaris Live Upgrade and Upgrade Planning
• Solaris 10 8/07 Installation Guide: Custom JumpStart and Advanced Installations
• Solaris 10 8/07 Package List
• Solaris 10 8/07 Release Notes
• Solaris 10 8/07 Installation Guide: Solaris Flash Archives (Creation and Installation)
• Solaris 10 8/07 Installation Guide: Planning for Installation and Upgrade
• Solaris 10 8/07 Installation Guide: Network-Based Installations

Liam Merwick reports that many bugs have been fixed related to LDoms:

• Networking
  
• 6405380 LDoms vSwitch needs to be modified to support network interfaces
• 6418780 vswitch needs to be able to process updates to its MD node
• 6447559 vswitch should take advantage of multiple unicast address support
• 6474949 vSwitch panics if mac_open of the underlying network device fails
• 6492423 vSwitch multi-ring code hangs when queue thread not started
• 6492705 vsw warning messages should identify device instance number
• 6512604 handshake untimeout() race condition in vnet
• 6517019 vgen_multicst does not handle kmem_zalloc failure
• 6496374 vsw: "turnstile_block: unowned mutex" panic on a diskless-clients test bed
• 6514591 vsw: fix for 6496374 causes softhang
• 6523926 handshake restart can fail following reboot under certain conditions
• 6523891 vsw needs to update lane state correctly for RDX pkts
• 6512604 handshake untimeout() race condition in vnet
• 6496374 vsw: "turnstile_block: unowned mutex" panic on a diskless-clients test bed
• 6523926 handshake restart can fail following reboot under certain conditions
• 6556036 vswitch panics when trying to boot over vnet interface
• Disk
• 6520626 Assertion panic in vdc following primary domain reboot
  
• 6527265 Hard hang in guest ldom on issuing the format command
  
• 6534269 vdc incorrectly allocs mem handle for synchronous DKIOCFLUSHWRITECACHE calls
  
• 6547651 fix for 6524333 badly impact performance when writing to a vdisk
  
• 6524333 Service domain panics if it fails to map pages for a disk on file
  
• 6530040 vds does not close underlying physical device or file properly
• General
• 6488115 reboot from guest via break hangs
• 6495154 mdeg should not print a warning when the MD generation number does not change
• 6520018 vntsd gets confused and immediately closes newly established console connections
  
• 6505472 RC1 build: guest ldg(s) softhang during repeat boot
  
• 6521890 recursive mutex_enter in ldc_set_cb_mode
  
• 6528180 link state change is not handled under certain conditions in ldc
  
• 6526280 Guest with 64 vdisk devices hangs during boot
• 6528758 'ds_cap_send: invalid handle' message during LDom boot

Liam also notes,

It is also possible to patch Solaris 10 11/06 by applying the SPARC KU patch, 120011-14 and get the new LDoms functionality for UltraSPARC-T1 based machines.

Sun to Buy Cluster File Systems

Sun is buying Cluster File Systems, Inc. (CFS), of Boulder, Colorado, the firm who makes the high performance parallel file system, Lustre.

Sun reached a high place on the TOP500 supercomputer list this year with TSUBAME, a supercomputer in the Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) at their Global Scientific Information and Computing Center. Lustre is a key ingredient of TSUBAME.

Lustre servers handle hundreds of GigaBytes per second in I/O coming from clusters with many 10,000's of client systems, hundreds of servers and petabytes of storage.

Just recently, CFS, announce that it use the OpenSolaris ZFS disk file system on Lustre servers running Linux operating systems.

What's cool about Solaris 10 8/07 (Update 4)?

Here's a video of Rich Green, a Sun executive, saying why the new Solaris release is cool:

http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/gallery/solaris10_807.xml

Jeff Victor listed some of the improvements that he like as:

• adds significant new functionality to Solaris Containers
• improves network performance with Large Send Offload
• several ZFS improvements (including "zpool history" to review recent commands)
• fault management support for AMD64 Rev F and G systems (including detection and recovery from correctable CPU and memory problems)
• Quagga routing software
• an iSCSI target, including for ZFS file systems
• Thunderbird 2.0
• XVideo support on RealPlayer
• X11R7.2
• Compact Flash card support
• NVIDIA accelerated graphics drivers

What is the difference is between OpenOffice.org and StarOffice?

David Lee Todd writes in his blog entry, The OpenOffice.org ecosystem and the StarOffice distro:

Like the Linux community, the OpenOffice.org community encourages others to develop their own distributions -- “distros” -- of the OpenOffice.org software by picking and choosing from its modules, and by adding their own modules. StarOffice is such a distro, created by taking the OpenOffice.org core, and adding various commercially-oriented modules, such as an advanced spellchecker licensed from a third party.

I've used the software since it Sun bought Star Division in 1999. It has come a long way. I have
OpenOffice on all my machines - Windows, Mac, Solaris.

I'm a big fan of Google docs and I like that I can import and export to ods file formats. However, I see that an a one way process:

• compose, revise, import to google docs, share
  OR
• create in Google docs, collaberate, export to ods, import to OpenOffice or StarOffice, cleanup, publish
  

DTrace useful links

Peerapong Kunasirirat posted a nice list of DTrace links in a recent posting:

Brendan Gregg's Blog (the creator of DTraceToolkit) : http://blogs.sun.com/brendan/

Brendan Gregg's Home page : http://www.brendangregg.com/

DTrace Tools : http://www.brendangregg.com/dtrace.html

DTraceToolkit : http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/dtrace/dtracetoolkit

DTraceToolkit Preso file : http://prefetch.net/presentations/DTraceToolkit_Presentation.pdf

Brendan Gregg's Preso on DTrace Workshop : http://www.context-switch.com/performance/dtrace_workshop01_slides.pdf

OpenSolaris DTrace Student Guide : http://opensolaris.org/os/community/documentation/files/studentguide.pdf

SolarisInternal.COM DTrace Intro : http://www.solarisinternals.com/wiki/index.php/DTrace_Topics_Intro

SolarisInternal.COM DTraceToolkit : http://www.solarisinternals.com/wiki/index.php/DTraceToolkit

ColorTrace : http://blogs.sun.com/brendan/entry/colortrace

Blog O' Matty : http://prefetch.net/blog/index.php/category/solaris-dtrace/

I'll add

Tech Talk at Google on DTrace : http://blogs.sun.com/bmc/entry/dtrace_at_google

A Brief History of Solaris releases

Solaris 7 – 1998
Solaris 8 – 2000 - latest update is Solaris 8 2/04
Solaris 9 – 2002 - latest update is Solaris 9 9/05
Solaris 10 1/05 = Solaris 10
Solaris 10 1/06 = Update 1
Solaris 10 6/06 = Update 2
Solaris 10 11/06 = Update 3
Solaris 10 8/07= Update 4 – Now Available!
Planning Spring '08 = Update 5

Messaging Server 6.3 now supports the ZFS file system

Sun reports that the Sun Java System Messaging Server 6.3 now supports the ZFS file system, with the certain caveats:

• certain patches
• Solaris only - at least update 3
• limits on when zfs snapshots and restores are performed
  

JS: The Continuing Rise of OpenOffice.org

In Jonathan Schwartz's latest blog, he talks about the announcement that "IBM will be joining the community to collaborate on the development of OpenOffice.org software".

His observation is that "Free software, like free search or video, appeals to the broadest segment of the world's population - free is a universally attractive price tag".

Sun and AMD set to overtake Blue Gene/L

The Registers reports in "AMD set to overtake Blue Gene/L" that

AMD and Sun are working with Texans in TACC Supercomputer project. TACC (Texas Advance Computing Center) won $59 Million from National Science Foundation to build largest supercomputer, and this baby is currently being assembled - plan is to deliver 500 TFLOPS, or almost double the number that Blue Gene/L achieves.

TACC will have 16.000 AMD Barcelonas, 100TB of RAM and 1.7 PB of storage.

New Zones Features

Jeff Victor's article on New Zones Features describes many of the Zones related enhancements to Solaris 10 8/07. Jeff describes how to:

• Set a physical memory cap on a Container
• Cap Virtual memory (i.e. swap space)
• Set locked memory (i.e. prevent from being paged out) limits
  
• Dedicate CPUs to a zone
• Set shared memory, and ids for shared memory, semaphores and message queues by Container
• Use the Fair Share Scheduler to simply assign cpu-shares to a zone
• Assign DTrace privileges, dtrace_proc and dtrace_user to a Container
  
• Grant exclusive access to one or more network interfaces to a Container
• Set up Container to Container communication via an external box
• Upgrade and Patch Containers with Live Upgrade
  

2007 InfoWorld Bossie Awards

The 2007 InfoWorld Bossie Awards shows that the world of Free and Open Source software has a lot to offer. It's well work reviewing the winner in all the categories.

Sun took awards in three areas

Best of open source in platforms and middleware

• GlassFish

Best of open source in software development

• NetBeans

Best of open source in storage

• ZFS
  

Robert Scoble interviews Sun's ZFS designers

This video podcast Talking storage systems with Sun's ZFS team features Robert Scoble interviewing ZFS designers:

• Jeff Bonwick, distinguished engineer, storage CTO
• Bill Moore, hardware/software architect

Detailed Document on the UltraSPARC T2 (Niagara 2)

A side-effect of open-sourcing its SPARC designs and selling chips and service to OEMS is that a lot of information is being made available by Sun. For example, "UltraSPARC T2 Supplement to the UltraSPARC Architecture 2007" is a 1100 page detailed description of UltraSPARC T2.

Here's the table of contents:

1. UltraSPARC T2 Basics.
2. Data Formats.
3. Registers
4. Instruction Format
5. Instruction Definitions
6. Traps
7. Interrupt Handling
8. Memory Models
9. Address Spaces and ASIs
10. Performance Instrumentation
    
11. Implementation Dependencies
    
12. Memory Management Unit
13. Clocks, Reset, RED_state, and Initialization
14. CMT
15. Noncacheable Unit (NCU) and Boot ROM Interfaces
16. Error Handling
17. Memory Controller
18. Power Management
19. Configuration and Diagnostics Support
20. Hardware Debug Support
21. Stream Processing Unit and Random Number Generator
22. PCI Express Interface Unit (PIU)
23. Network Interface Unit: Introduction
24. Network Interface Unit: Interrupts and Virtualization
25. Network Interface Unit: Receive Packet Classification
26. Network Interface Unit: Receive DMA
27. Network Interface Unit: Transmit DMA Channels
28. Network Interface Unit: Ethernet Media Adaptation Controller (MAC)
29. Network Interface Unit: Ethernet SerDes

I like that Sun has included a hardware-based random number generator in the chip.

3 1/2 Minute Video: Solaris 10 8/07

There is a good but brief video of Rich Green describing Solaris 10 (aka Update 4) on Sun's web site. There are many new features whose benefits Rich draws attention to.

Here is a list of what's New in the Solaris 10 8/07 Release:

System Administration Features

• Name Service Switch Enhancements
• iostat Improvements
• ZFS Command Improvements and Changes
• Solaris System Registration
• Sun Service Tag
• PxIO Path Steering
• raidctl
• Brand-Specific Handlers for zoneadm Commands
• x86: Fault Management For Next Generation AMD Opteron Processors
• x86: Predictive Self-Healing for PCI Express on x64 Systems
• x86: stmsboot Porting
• x86: Concurrent FPDMA READ/WRITE QUEUED Under SATA Module
• x86: Tagged Queuing Installation Enhancements

Installation Enhancements

• NFSv4 Domain Name Configurable During Installation
• Solaris Live Upgrade
• Upgrading the Solaris OS When Non-Global Zones Are Installed
• Keyboard Configuration Automated
• Deferred-Activation Patching

Networking Enhancements

• IPsec Tunnel Reform
• Packet Filter Hooks
• SMF Enhancements to Routing Management
• Quagga Software Routing Suite
• DHCPv6 Client
• Single Hosts File
• Large Send Offload
• x86: nge Driver Updated to Support Jumbo Framework
• NFSv4 Domain Name Configurable During Installation

Security Enhancements

• Solaris Key Management Framework
• libmd Message Digest library
• Solaris Cryptographic Framework

File System Enhancements

• Support for iSCSI Target Devices
• Extended FILE Space for 32-bit Solaris Processes

System Resources Enhancements

• lx Branded Zones: Solaris Containers for Linux Applications
• Improved zonecfg Procedures for Creating Containers
• IP Instances: LAN and VLAN Separation for Non-Global Zones
• Solaris Zones Boot Enhancements
• System V Resource Controls for Zones
• Zone Unique Identifier
• Ability to Mark Zones as "Incomplete"
• Using DTrace in a Non-Global Zone

Desktop Tools

• Thunderbird 2.0
• Firefox 2.0 Web Browser
• Gaim OTR plugin
• x86: XVideo Support RealPlayer

X11 Windowing Features

• dtlogin Language Selection Overhaul
• X Server DTrace Provider
• Xorg X11R7.2 Server and Drivers

Language Support Enhancements

• Migration of Existing EMEA, Central and South American Locales to Common Locale Data Repository
• Japanese Font Update
• More Japanese iconv Modules for Unicode
• Input Method Switcher Enhancement and EMEA Keyboard Layout Emulation Support
• x86: Zero-CountryCode Keyboard Layout Support

Developer Tool Enhancements

• SunVTS 6.4

New Drivers

• Reliable Datagram Sockets
• USCSI LUN Reset Support
• SATA HBA Framework and Marvell Driver
• Compact Flash Support
• CardBus Support
• IBM LTO-4 Tape Drive Support
• HP LTO-4 Tape Drive Support
• NVIDIA Accelerated Graphics Drivers
• SPARC: ntwdt Driver for UltraSPARC-T1 (Niagara) Systems
• x86: ACPI Thermal Zone Monitor
• x86: Adaptec aac Hardware Support
• x86: Solaris Audio Driver for ATI IXP400
• x86: High-Definition Audio Driver
• x86: SATA AHCI HBA Driver

System Performance Enhancements

• SPARC: UltraSPARC-T1 (Niagara) II PCI Express Interface Unit Performance Counter Data
• Multi-level CMT Scheduling Optimizations
• Process Count Scalability
• MPSS Extended to Shared Memory

Device Management Features

• Enhanced st SCSI Reservations
• CPU Power Management

Console Subsystem Features

• Coherent Console