Solaris Express Developer Edition What's New

New Features in Solaris Express Developer Edition 1/08

Solaris Trusted Extensions Administrator's Procedures

This system administration enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

Starting with this release, the Solaris Trusted Extensions packages are installed when the Solaris OS is installed. The ExtraValue directory is no longer present. This directory previously included the Solaris Trusted Extensions packages. The Solaris Trusted Extensions functionality is managed by the service management facility (SMF) as the svc:/system/labeld:default service. This service must be enabled. After the service is in the online state, reboot the system to activate Solaris Trusted Extensions. Additional configuration is required after the reboot. For more information, see Part I, Initial Configuration of Trusted Extensions, in Solaris Trusted Extensions Administrator’s Procedures.

The Developer 1/08 release also includes the following features:

The domain of interpretation (DOI) is configurable. For more information, see Network Security Attributes in Trusted Extensions in Solaris Trusted Extensions Administrator’s Procedures.
The NFSv3 protocol supports multilevel mounts. For more information, see Trusted Extensions Software and NFS Protocol Versions in Solaris Trusted Extensions Administrator’s Procedures.
The name service cache daemon (nscd) can be separately configured per labeled zone. This configuration supports environments where each zone is connected to a subnetwork that runs at the label of the zone, and the subnetwork has its own name server for that label.

For more information about Solaris Trusted Extensions, see Solaris Trusted Extensions Administrator’s Procedures.

Network Data Management Protocol Service

This system administration enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

The Network Data Management Protocol (NDMP) is a standard for backing up data, usually to tape, from network clients. With NDMP running as a service, any NDMP-compliant data management application on the network is a client and can back up its data to the NDMP server, a Sun StorageTek NAS appliance.

StarOffice 8

This desktop tools enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

Starting with this release, StarOffice 8 has been enhanced to include a new Chart engine.

For more information about the new Chart engine, see http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Chart2/Features2.3. For more information about StarOffice, see http://www.sun.com/software/star/staroffice/whats_new.jsp.

GNOME 2.20

This desktop tools enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

GNOME 2.20 is the latest version of the multi-platform desktop environment, GNOME Desktop. GNOME 2.20 contains the following features:

Email client – The email client, Evolution, contains the following features:
- Attachment warning
- Email notification icon in panel's notification area
- Backup
- “Magic Space Bar”
Text Editing – Gedit, has an all-new syntax highlighting system which now supports syntax highlighting for scripting languages such as PHP and Ruby.
File Management – Desktop search is integrated into the file chooser dialog. The Nautilus file manager now displays more information in the Properties window for drives, including a pie graph that displays how much space is left. In addition, you can now see the overall disk usage in the Disk Usage Analyzer utility.
Control Panel – For GNOME 2.20, the control panels are reorganized slightly to reduce the number of control panels, making it easier to find what you need. For example, this release introduces Appearance control panel applet. The Theme, Background, Fonts, and Interface applets have been merged to create this new applet, simplifying the Preferences menu. In addition, some of the Accessibility preferences have been moved to a new tab in the Preferred Applications control panel.
Help System – The GNOME help browser (yelp) infrastructure is modified to improve the style and layout of the help system. In addition, the colors match your current theme better. Help pages appear more quickly, as individual pages are now loaded on demand instead of the entire manual being parsed unnecessarily.
Right-To-Left Language Interfaces – Right-to-left language interfaces are present for languages such as Arabic and Hebrew which are written from right to left. Users of these languages expect most user interface elements to be similarly mirrored, compared to left-to-right user interfaces.
GTK+ – GNOME 2.20 uses version 2.12 of the GTK+ UI toolkit API.
Glib – The Glib utility library now has a g_get_user_special_dir() that provides the path to special folders defined by FreeDesktop.org's xdg-user-dirs specification and tool. For text processing, the new GRegex API provides regular expression string matching without the need for an additional library.
Glade – Starting with this release, there are user interface and architectural improvements. For example, tool windows such as the editor, the inspector, and the palette, are now dockable.
Accerciser – Accerciser is an interactive Python accessibility explorer, and a replacement of at-poke.
Rarian – Rarian is a documentation meta-data library, designed as a replacement for Scrollkeeper.
Gnome-devel-docs – Gnome-devel-docs is the GNOME developer documentation suite.
Poppler-data – New private data is installed under /usr/share/poppler containing private encoding files for use with poppler.
GNOME Display Manager (GDM) – GDM now has better utmp and wtmp auditing. GDM can also now use Role Based Access Control (RBAC) to control access to the Shutdown, Reboot, and Suspend features.
Avahi – Some GNOME applications, such as Ekiga and Rhythmbox, provide support for service discovery and registration using Avahi. The Avahi client API can be used by all GNOME applications. The Avahi daemon makes calls to the Bonjour API and uses the Bonjour server for service discovery and registration. On Linux and FreeBSD platforms, the Avahi daemon implements the mDNS stack.

Enhancements to the Solaris ZFS File System

This sections describes new ZFS features in the Developer 1/08 release.

Using Cache Devices in Your ZFS Storage Pool – In this Solaris release, you can create pool and specify cache devices, which are used to cache storage pool data.

Cache devices provide an additional layer of caching between main memory and disk. Using cache devices provide the greatest performance improvement for random read-workloads of mostly static content.

One or more cache devices can specified when the pool is created. For example:

# zpool create pool mirror c0t2d0 c0t4d0 cache c0t0d0
# zpool status pool
  pool: pool
 state: ONLINE
 scrub: none requested
config:

        NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
        pool        ONLINE       0     0     0
          mirror    ONLINE       0     0     0
            c0t2d0  ONLINE       0     0     0
            c0t4d0  ONLINE       0     0     0
        cache
          c0t0d0    ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

After cache devices are added, they gradually fill with content from main memory. Depending on the size of your cache device, it could take over an hour for them to fill. Capacity and reads can be monitored by using the zpool iostat command as follows:

# zpool iostat -v pool 5

Cache devices can be added or removed from the pool after the pool is created.

For more information, see zpool(1M) and Solaris ZFS Administration Guide.

Enhancements to the zfs send Command – This release includes the following enhancements to the zfs send command.

Send all incremental streams from one snapshot to a cumulative snapshot. For example:

# zfs list
NAME                      USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT
pool                      428K  16.5G    20K  /pool
pool/fs                    71K  16.5G    21K  /pool/fs
pool/fs@snapA              16K      -  18.5K  -
pool/fs@snapB              17K      -    20K  -
pool/fs@snapC              17K      -  20.5K  -
pool/fs@snapD                0      -    21K  -
# zfs send -I pool/fs@snapA pool/fs@snapD > /snaps/fs@combo

Send all incremental snapshots between fs@snapA to fs@snapD to fs@combo.

Send an incremental stream from the origin snapshot to create a clone. The original snapshot must already exist on the receiving side to accept the incremental stream. For example:
# zfs send -I pool/fs@snap1 pool/clone@snapA > /snaps/fsclonesnap-I . . # zfs receive -F pool/clone < /snaps/fsclonesnap-I
Send a replication stream of all descendent file systems, up to the named snapshots. When received, all properties, snapshots, descendent file systems, and clones are preserved. For example:
zfs send -R pool/fs@snap > snaps/fs-R
For an extended example, see Sending and Receiving Complex ZFS Snapshot Streams in Solaris ZFS Administration Guide.
Send an incremental replication stream.
zfs send -R -[iI] @snapA pool/fs@snapD
For an extended example, see Sending and Receiving Complex ZFS Snapshot Streams in Solaris ZFS Administration Guide.

For more information, see Saving and Restoring ZFS Data in Solaris ZFS Administration Guide.

ZFS Quotas and Reservations for File System Data Only – In addition to the existing ZFS quota and reservation features, this release includes dataset quotas and reservations that do not include descendents, such as snapshots and clones, in the space consumption accounting.
- The refquota property limits the amount of space a dataset can consume. This property enforces a hard limit on the amount of space that can be used. This hard limit does not include space used by descendents, such as snapshots and clones.
- The refreservation property sets the minimum amount of space that is guaranteed to a dataset, not including its descendents.
For example, you can set a 10 Gbyte refquota for studentA that sets a 10-Gbyte hard limit of referenced space. For additional flexibility, you can set a 20-Gbyte quota that allows you to manage studentA's snapshots.
# zfs set refquota=10g tank/studentA # zfs set quota=20g tank/studentA
For more information, see ZFS Quotas and Reservations in Solaris ZFS Administration Guide.
ZFS File System Properties for the Solaris CIFS Service – This release provides support for the Solaris Common Internet File System (CIFS) service. This product provides the ability to share files between Solaris and Windows or MacOS systems.

To facilitate sharing files between these systems by using the Solaris CIFS service, the following new ZFS properties are provided:
- Case sensitivity support (casesensitivity)
- Non-blocking mandatory locks (nbmand)
- SMB share support (sharesmb)
- Unicode normalization support (normalization)
- UTF-8 character set support (utf8only)
In addition to the ZFS properties added for supporting the Solaris CIFS software product, the vscan property is available for scanning ZFS files if you have a 3rd party virus scanning engine.

For more information about using these properties, see Managing ZFS Properties in Solaris ZFS Administration Guide.

For more information about the Solaris CIFS service, see the Solaris CIFS Administration Guide.

ZFS Storage Pool Properties – This release provides ZFS pool property information. For example:

# zpool get all users
NAME   PROPERTY     VALUE       SOURCE
users  size         16.8G       -
users  used         217M        -
users  available    16.5G       -
users  capacity     1%          -
users  altroot      -           default
users  health       ONLINE      -
users  guid         11063207170669925585  -
users  version      8           default
users  bootfs       -           default
users  delegation   on          default
users  autoreplace  off         default
users  temporary    on          local

The cachefile property – This release provides the cachefile property, which controls where pool configuration information is cached. All pools in the cache are automatically imported when the system boots. However, installation and clustering environments might need to cache this information in a different location so that pools are not automatically imported.

You can set this property to cache pool configuration in a different location that can be imported later by using the zpool import c command. For most ZFS configurations, this property would not be used.

The cachefile property is not persistent and is not stored on disk. This property replaces the temporary property that was used to indicate that pool information should not be cached in previous Solaris releases.
The failmode property – This release provides the failmode property for determining the behavior of a catastrophic pool failure due to a loss of device connectivity or the failure of all devices in the pool. The failmode property can be set to these values: wait, continue, or panic. The default value is wait, which means you must reconnect the device or replace a failed device and clear the error with the zpool clear command.

The failmode property is set like other settable ZFS properties, which can be set either before or after the pool is created. For example:
# zpool set failmode=continue tank # zpool get failmode tank NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE tank failmode continue local
# zpool create -o failmode=continue
For a description of all ZFS pool properties, see Managing ZFS Storage Pool Properties in Solaris ZFS Administration Guide.

ZFS and File System Mirror Mounts – In this Solaris release, NFSv4 mount enhancements are provided to make ZFS file systems more accessible to NFS clients.

When file systems are created on the NFS server, the NFS client can automatically discover these newly created file systems within their existing mount of a parent file system.

For example, if the server neo already shares the tank file system and client zee has it mounted, /tank/baz is automatically visible on the client after it is created on the server.
zee# mount neo:/tank /mnt zee# ls /mnt baa bar neo# zfs create tank/baz zee% ls /mnt baa bar baz zee% ls /mnt/baz file1 file2

See the following What's New sections for related ZFS feature information:

x86: Support for Suspend-to-RAM “Sleep” Feature

This system resource enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

Starting with this release, the Solaris OS includes support for the Suspend to RAM (S3) “Sleep” feature. This feature is supported on Solaris x86 based platforms that include compliant drivers, for example the Sun Ultra^TM 20 M2 Workstation. For a driver to be considered compliant, the driver must support a specific feature set.

For more information, see Chapter 12, Power Management, in Writing Device Drivers.

Note –

As platforms become compliant, they will be added to the list of supported workstations.

x86: Virtualization Using the Sun xVM Hypervisor

This system resource enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

The goal of virtualization is to move from managing individual datacenter components to managing pools of resources. By consolidating multiple hosts and services on a single machine, virtualization reduces costs through the sharing of hardware, infrastructure, and administration.

The Sun xVM Hypervisor is based on the work of the Xen open source community. In a running system, the Hypervisor fits between the hardware and the operating system instance. The Hypervisor can securely execute multiple virtual machines simultaneously on a single x86-compatible computer, with each virtual machine running its own operating system.

Each virtual machine instance is called a domain. There are two kinds of domains. There is one control domain, also called domain 0, or dom0. A guest operating system is called a guest domain, also referred to as domain U or domU. You can have multiple guest domains on your system.

Within Hypervisor based solutions, there are two basic types of virtualization, full virtualization and paravirtualization. The Hypervisor supports both modes. A system can have both paravirtualized and fully virtualized domains running simultaneously.

The xVM Hypervisor virtualizes the system's hardware. This means that it transparently shares and partitions the system's resources, such as CPUs, memory, and NICs, among the guest domains.

The Hypervisor runs on x64 and x86 based systems. Supported configurations include Solaris dom0, and Solaris domU, Linux domU, FreeBSD domU, and Windows domU guests. Solaris zones and branded zones can be run within a Solaris domU.

For more information, see the following:

System Administration Guide: Virtualization Using the Solaris Operating System
http://opensolaris.org/os/community/xen
Man pages:
- xVM(5)
- virsh(1M)
- virt-install(1M)
- xenconsoled(1M)
- xend(1M)
- xenstored(1M)
- xentop(1M)
- xm(1M)

x86: Enhanced Speedstep CPU Power Management

This device management enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

Stating with this release, Intel's Enhanced Speedstep^TM technology is supported on Solaris. Enhanced Speedstep support enables Solaris users to manage the power consumption of their Intel processors by lowering the processor frequency during idle periods.

For more information on how to enable Solaris CPU power management, see the power.conf(4) man page.

Faulty Device Retirement Feature

This device management enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

Starting with this release, the Solaris OS includes a new device retirement mechanism to isolate a device as faulty by the fault management framework (FMA). This feature allows faulty devices to be safely and automatically inactivated to avoid data loss, data corruption, or panics and system down time. The retirement process is done safely, taking into account the stability of the system after the device has been retired.

Critical devices are never retired. If you need to manually replace a retired device, use the fmadm repair command after the device replacement so that system knows that the device is replaced, in addition to the manual replacement steps.

The fmadm repair process is as follows:

Identify the faulted device with the fmadm faulty -a command.

# fmadm faulty

   STATE RESOURCE / UUID

-------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------

faulty   <fmri>

Clear the fault by using the fmadm repair command.
# fmadm repair <fmri>
Run the fmadm faulty command again to be sure the fault is cleared.
# fmadm faulty -a STATE RESOURCE / UUID

For more information, see fmadm(1M).

A general message regarding device retirement is displayed on the console and written to the /var/adm/messages file so that you aware of a retired device. For example:

Aug 9 18:14 starbug genunix: [ID 751201 kern.notice] 
NOTICE: One or more I/O devices have been retired

You can use the prtconf command to identify specific retired devices. For example:

# prtconf
.
.
.
pci, instance #2
        scsi, instance #0
            disk (driver not attached)
            tape (driver not attached)
            sd, instance #3
            sd, instance #0 (retired)
        scsi, instance #1 (retired)
            disk (retired)
            tape (retired)
    pci, instance #3
        network, instance #2 (driver not attached)
        network, instance #3 (driver not attached)
    os-io (driver not attached)
    iscsi, instance #0
    pseudo, instance #0
.
.
.

Sun StorageTek Traffic Manager

This device management enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

Starting with this release, the mechanisms described in scsi_vhci(7D) to override the autoconfiguration behavior have changed. Existing customization will be converted to the new mechanism on upgrade.

For more information, see the scsi_vhci(7D) man page and Solaris SAN Configuration and Multipathing Guide.

Improved IPsec NAT-Traversal

This networking enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

Starting with this release, IPsec Key Management applications can now enable or disable NAT-Traversal through a UDP socket option, and enable the correct PF_KEY extensions on their IPsec Security Associations.

Inetd Backlog Queue Size

This networking enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

Starting with this release, a tunable to set the backlog queue size of the inetd managed services is introduced. This feature adds an SMF property to inetd called connection_backlog using which the queue size can be modified. The default value of the connection_backlog queue size is 10. You can modify the connection_backlog property by using the inetadm command. For example:

To list the properties:
#inetadm -l <fmri/pattern>

To change the value for a specific service:

#inetadm -m <fmri/pattern> conection_backlog=<new value>

To change the value globally:

#inetadm -M connection_backlog=<newvalue>

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

Xvnc Server and Vncviewer Client

This X11 windowing enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

VNC provides a remote desktop session over the Remote Frame Buffer (RFB) protocol. RFB clients, better known as VNC viewers, are available for most platforms, in both open source and commercial releases.

The Developer 1/08 release now includes Xvnc, an X server based on the open source releases from the RealVNC project and X.Org Foundation, that displays to a RFB protocol client over the network, without requiring an existing X server session displayed on local video hardware. This release also includes the RealVNC vncviewer RFB client to connect to remote VNC servers, and several associated programs for managing these.

For more information, see System Administration Guide: Virtualization Using the Solaris Operating System. See also, the Xvnc(1) and vncviewer(1) man pages.

64-bit SPARC: Memory Placement Optimization Support For sun4v Platforms

This system performance enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

Memory Placement Optimization (MPO) enables operating systems to allocate memory local to the core where the threads or processes are executing The sun4v architecture runs on virtualized hardware environment. The MPO for sun4v platforms feature provides the required standard accessors in the sun4v layer to provide locality information for the generic MPO framework. This feature is effective on the platforms where multiple sockets with memory access latency differences exist. The MPO feature enhances the performance of various applications by enabling the OS to allocate memory local to the nodes.

Solaris CIFS Service

This file system enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

The Solaris CIFS service provides a native, well-integrated CIFS service to support Windows, MacOS, and other CIFS clients. This service offers ubiquitous access to files that are shared between CIFS and NFS clients. The Solaris CIFS server can act as a member server within an Active Directory domain. The Solaris CIFS service provides file system access to Windows and Mac OS clients through CIFS shares with support for both local and Active Directory domain authentication.

Similar to NFS, CIFS provides network file system services. CIFS also provides services, such as network transport for sub-protocols like named pipes, MS-RPC services, and interfaces to core Windows functionality.

For more information, see the following:

Solaris CIFS Administration Guide
smbadm(1M), smbd(1M), smbstat(1M), and smbautohome(4), smbd(1M), and pam_smb_passwd(5) man pages.

Solaris Trusted Extensions Supports Mounting Labeled Filesystems With the NFSv3 Protocol

This security enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

Starting with this release, the Solaris Trusted Extensions software can mount labeled file systems by using NFS Version 3 (NFSv3) in addition to NFS Version 4 (NFSv4). Solaris Trusted Extensions has no restrictions in using TCP as an underlying transport protocol for NFS. However, users cannot choose UDP as the underlying protocol for read-down NFS access for NFSv3. The use of UDP for the initial mount operation is supported, but UDP is not supported for subsequent multilevel NFSv3 operations.

VSCAN Service

This security enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

The Solaris OS now supports integrated virus scanning of ZFS-resident files by using the ICAP protocol to send candidate files to external third-party, off-the-shelf virus scanning products.

For more information, see the following:

System Administration Guide: Security Services
vscanadm(1M) and vscand(1M) man pages

SPARC: Hardware Accelerated Elliptical Curve Cryptography (ECC) Support

This security enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

The UltraSPARC-T2 based platforms support hardware acceleration of Elliptical Curve Cryptography (ECC) algorithms. The Solaris OS now supports high performance ECDSA and ECDH on these platforms. These new ECC algorithms are accessible to all users of the Solaris Cryptographic Framework including JAVA and OpenSSL users.

Unicode-Encoding Conversion Kernel Functions

This kernel functions enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

Starting with this release, a set of Unicode-encoding conversion kernel and user land functions is available for the UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32 Unicode encodings. Big-endian and little-endian variations of the encodings and Byte Order Mark processing are also supported.

For more information, see the uconv_u16tou32(9F) and uconv_u16tou32(3C) man pages.

Unicode UTF-8 Text Preparation Kernel Functions

This kernel functions enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

This feature introduces a new set of kernel and user land functions that can be used to perform Unicode Normalizations and Unicode simple-case conversions on UTF-8 text. There are also functions for UTF-8 string comparison and validation with various options.

For more information, see the following man pages:

Squid Cache

This Web Stack enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

Squid is a fully-featured HTTP/1.0 proxy. Squid offers a rich access control, authorization and logging environment to develop web proxy and content serving applications.

For more information, see http://www.squid-cache.org/Versions/v2/2.6/cfgman/.

32-bit: PHP 5

This Web Stack enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

Starting with this release, the Solaris OS includes PHP 5. PHP Hypertext Preprocessor is a popular scripting language for web application development.

For more information, see http://www.php.net/.

Ruby 1.8.6 and Rubygems 0.9.4

This Web Stack enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

Starting with this release, the Ruby programming language, certain extensions, the Rails application framework, and the Rubygems package management system are supported.

For more information, see the following:

http://www.ruby-lang.org for information on the Ruby programming language.
http://www.rubygems.org for information on Rubygems.

Apache 2.2 HTTP Server

This Web Stack enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

Starting with this release, the Solaris OS includes the Apache 2.2.6 HTTP server. The Apache server supports multiple MPMs, PHP, prefork, and worker.

For more information, see http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/.

MySQL 5.0.45

This Web Stack enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

Starting with this release, the Solaris OS includes the MySQL 5.0.45 Relational Database Management Syatems.

Perl Database Interface and PostgreSQL Driver for Perl

This additional software enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

Perl Database Interface (DBI) is a generic database interface to talk to specific DB back-end. DBD::Pg is a PostgreSQL driver that will enable Perl applications to interact with PostgreSQL back-end through DBI.

For more information, see the following: