System Administration Enhancements

This section describes system administration enhancements in this release.

ZFS Features and Changes

This section summarizes new features in the ZFS file system in this release. For more information about these new features, see the Oracle Solaris ZFS Administration Guide.

• Send stream enhancements – You can set file system properties that are sent and received in a snapshot stream. These enhancements provide flexibility in the following areas:

  • Applying file system properties in a send stream to the receiving file system

  • Determining whether the local file system properties should be ignored when received, such as a mountpoint property value

• Identifying snapshot differences – You can determine ZFS snapshot differences by using the zfs diff command.

  For example, assume that the first snapshot (snap1) is taken after fileA is created. Then, the second snapshot (snap2) is taken after fileB is created.

  $ ls /tank/username
  fileA
  $ zfs snapshot tank/username@snap1
  $ ls /tank/username
  fileA  fileB
  $ zfs snapshot tank/username@snap2

  You can identify the snapshot differences through the zfs diff command:

  $ zfs diff tank/username@snap1 tank/username@snap2
  M       /tank/username/
  +       /tank/username/fileB

  In this output, M indicates that the directory has been modified. The + indicates that fileB exists in the later snapshot.

• Pool recovery enhancements – The following new ZFS storage pool features are available:

  • You can import a pool with a missing log by using the zpool import -m command.

  • You can import a pool in read-only mode. This feature is primarily for pool recovery. If a damaged pool cannot be accessed because the underlying devices are damaged, you can import the pool read-only to recover the data.

• Tuning ZFS synchronous behavior – You can determine a ZFS file system's synchronous behavior by using the sync property. The sync property values are standard, always, and disabled.

  The default synchronous behavior (standard) is to write all synchronous file system transactions to the intent log and to flush all devices to ensure that the data is stable. Disabling the default synchronous behavior is not recommended. Applications that depend on synchronous support might be affected and data loss could occur. For example, unwritten transactions could be lost during a power failure.

  The property can be set before or after the data is created, and it takes effect immediately. For example:

  # zfs set sync=always tank/perrin

  This command makes the zil_disable parameter no longer available in Oracle Solaris releases that include the sync property.

• Improved ZFS pool messages – You can use the -T option to provide an interval and count value for the zpool list and zpool status commands to display additional information. In addition, more pool scrub and resilver information is provided in the zpool status command.

• ACL interoperability improvements – This release provides the following Access Control List (ACL) improvements:

  • Trivial ACLs do not require deny access entries except for unusual permissions. For example, a mode of 0644, 0755, 0664 does not need deny access entries but modes such as 0705, 0060 still require deny access entries.

  • ACLs are no longer split into multiple access entries during inheritance to try to preserve the original unmodified permission. Instead, permissions are modified as necessary to enforce the file creation mode.

  • The aclinherit property behavior includes a reduction of permissions when the property is set to restricted, which means ACLs are no longer split into multiple access entries during inheritance.

  • An existing ACL is discarded during chmod(2) operations by default. This change means that the ZFS aclmode property is no longer available.

  • A new permission mode calculation rule means that if an ACL has a user access entry that is also the file owner, then those permissions are included in the permission mode computation. The same rule applies if a group access entry is the group owner of the file.

• Installation features – For installation enhancements in the ZFS file system, see ZFS Installation Enhancements.

SPARC: Support for Fast Reboot

The integration of the Fast Reboot feature of Oracle Solaris on the SPARC platform enables the -f option to be used with the reboot command to accelerate the boot process by skipping certain POST tests.

Fast Reboot on the SPARC platform is managed through the Service Management Facility (SMF) feature of Oracle Solaris and implemented through a boot configuration service, svc:/system/boot-config. The boot-config service provides a means for setting or changing the default boot configuration parameters. When the config/fastreboot_default property is set to true, the system performs a fast reboot automatically, without the need to use the reboot -f command. By default, this property's value is set to false on the SPARC platform.

To make Fast Reboot the default behavior on the SPARC platform, use the svccfg and svcadm commands. See Support for Fast Reboot on the SPARC Platform in System Administration Guide: Basic Administration and the svccfg(1M) and svcadm(1M) man pages for details.

For more information about Fast Reboot, see the reboot(1M) man page.

User-Level CMT Observability Tools

User-level CMT observability tools help users to get a better understanding of the loads on your system with Chip-Level Multithreading (CMT). The following commands have been added in this release:

• pginfo – Displays the OS view of the processor groups that share performance-relevant hardware

• pgstat – Displays hardware and software utilization of processor groups

For more information, see the pginfo(1M) and pgstat(1M) man pages.

diskinfo Utility

The diskinfo command-line utility enables system administrators to see the relationship between logical disk names (cXtYdZ) and bays in a JBOD or blade chassis.

The diskinfo utility depends on Fault Management Architecture (FMA) to provide label information. If certain prerequisites are met, the utility supports third-party JBODs or enclosures.

For more information about the prerequisites and limitations of this utility, see the diskinfo(1M) man page.

Oracle Configuration Manager

Oracle Configuration Manager (OCM) is integrated into the Oracle Solaris OS. OCM collects configuration information from the server running Oracle Solaris and uploads it to the Oracle repository. This data helps to reduce the time needed to resolve support issues.

By default, OCM is installed in the /opt/ocm/ccr directory (considered as OCM_HOME) in a disconnected mode. A user or an administrator has to manually enable the OCM collector daemon to start collecting the configuration information.

For more information about OCM, see http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E18041_01/doc.103/e18035/toc.htm. Chapter 5 provides information about how to enable OCM.

Flash Archive Integrity Check

You can now create a flash archive by specifying the /mnt directory with the -x (exclude) option of the flarcreate command. For example:

# flarcreate -n test -x /mnt /export/test.flar

For more information, see the flar(1M) man page.

Solaris Volume Manager Data Recovery

The metaimport command now supports diskset import when running an Oracle Solaris Cluster configuration. This enhancement enables data recovery for traditional and multi-owner SVM disksets in clustered and non-clustered configurations.

The metaimport command provides a mechanism to import disksets for data recovery by replicating disksets into an existing Solaris Volume Manager (SVM) configuration.

For more information, see the Solaris Volume Manager Administration Guide and the metaimport(1M) man page.

Oracle Solaris Groups Functionality

A user can now be a member of up to 1024 groups. This functionality must be enabled with the system tunable parameter ngroups_max in the /etc/system configuration file. For example:

set ngroups_max=1024

WARNING: ngroups_max of 1024 > 16, NFS AUTH_SYS will not work properly

LDAP Name Service

This section summarizes enhancements that have been made to the LDAP name service in this release.

• LDAP name service stand-alone support – This enhancement enables the LDAP name service tools ldapclient, ldapaddent, and ldaplist to populate and test an LDAP directory without having to configure the name service switch to use LDAP.

• Configure LDAP name service by using a secure port – This enhancement enables the LDAP name service to be configured to use only the LDAP secure port 636. As a result, the restriction that the LDAP naming service always requires access to the LDAP unsecure port 389 has been removed.

x86: Generic FMA Topology Enumerator

x86pi.so is a FMA topology enumerator that creates system topology from System Management BIOS (SMBIOS) compliant structures. The following enhancements have been made to the FMA topology enumerator:

• Ability to provide serial numbers for field replaceable units (FRUs) that can be tracked automatically by FMA when they are replaced by the repair depot.

• Ability to enumerate direct attached Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) disks. This enhancement enables the diagnosis of bad disks and the possibility of Automated System Recovery (ASR) for the replacement of a bad disk.

Oracle VTS 7.0 ps11

This section summarizes enhancements in the Oracle VTS 7.0 ps11 in this release.

Oracle Validation Test Suite (Oracle VTS) is a comprehensive hardware diagnostic tool that tests and validates the connectivity and functionality of most controllers and devices on Oracle platforms. The VTS tests are targeted for each hardware component or function in a system. The tool supports three user interfaces (UIs) – a graphical UI (GUI), a terminal-based UI, and a command–line interface (CLI).

Memory and CPU diagnostics include the following enhancements:

• The VTS kernel uses its own methods to access options and values in the sunvts.conf file from the VTS library. Changes in the configuration file for the option-value format parameter standardize the format of the configuration file and provide centralized accessibility from the code.

• An additional member of the execution mode, for example functional, exclusive, and online, has been added to the structure TEST_ENV_INFO_T (/include/testinfo.h). Individual test owners can use this member to decide the test's memory usage for a logical test and return an appropriate value to vtsk to aid in making better scheduling decisions.

Storage and Networking diagnostics include the following enhancements:

• Ability to specify inner, middle, and outer seek points, which enhances the disk test capability.

• diskmediatest enables you to specify whether the disk type is a Solid State Disk (SSD) in the /etc/sunvts/conf/sunvts.conf file.

• An additional iobustest option, target, which enables you to indicate a specific target machine to run the live network test.