Solaris 10 What's New

Driver Enhancements

The following new drivers and driver enhancements have been added to the Solaris 10 8/07 release.

Reliable Datagram Sockets

Starting with this release, Reliable Datagram Sockets (RDS) is a new protocol family that enables a socket to send messages to multiple destinations reliably over the InfiniBand interconnect.

RDS is delivered through a new SUNWrds package. The SUNWrds package consists of the rds and rdsib drivers for the socket and transport interface respectively.

Enhanced USB EHCI Host Controller Driver

Enhanced USB EHCI host controller driver provides isochronous transfer support for USB 2.0 or high speed isochronous devices.

For more information, see the usb_isoc_request(9S) man page.

USCSI LUN Reset Support

This feature is to supply the logical unit number (LUN) reset support by uscsi commands. Users can use LUN reset commands with uscsi_flags set as USCSI_RESET_LUN with this feature.

SATA HBA Framework and Marvell Driver

Starting with this release, READ/WRITE FPDMA QUEUED commands are supported. There is a considerable performance enhancement when performing I/O operations using the Marvell driver under specific work load conditions. Other workloads benefit to a smaller degree. The Sun Branded Hitachi 250GB HDS7225SBSUN250G drives have considerably better performance with larger writes using this feature.

There is also significant performance enhancement under many workloads for drives that support this optional portion of the SATA specification.

Compact Flash Support

The Compact Flash (CF) support feature enables you to use a CF card as an ATA disk through a CF-ATA adapter. This feature helps you start your system from a CF card and store your data on a CF card easily.

For more information about Compact Flash supporting, see the ata(7D) man page.

ACM driver of USB Communication Device Class

Starting with this release, the usbsacm driver supports USB modems that conform to the Universal Serial Bus Communication Device Class Abstract Control Model (USB CDC ACM) specification. Customers can attach the usbsacm driver with their mobile phones, PCMCIA cards, or any modem-like devices. The usbsacm driver outputs term nodes under /dev/term/. Customers can then use pppd(1M) to transmit datagrams over these serial ports.

CardBus Support

The CardBus support feature adds 32-bit PC Card support in Solaris. Both 16-bit and 32-bit PC Cards are now recognized by Solaris. For more information, see the pcic(7D)pcic(7D) and cardbus(4) man pages.

IBM LTO-4 Tape Drive Support

Starting with this release, the Solaris OS supports the IBM LTO-4 tape drive.

HP LTO-4 Tape Drive Support

Starting with this release, the Solaris OS supports the HP LTO-4 tape drive.

NVIDIA Accelerated Graphics Drivers

Starting with this release, the accelerated graphics drivers for Xorg and OpenGL for NVIDIA Quadro and GeForce cards are included. The nvidia-settings and nvidia-xconfig configuration tools for these drivers are also provided.

SPARC: ntwdt Driver for UltraSPARC-T1 (Niagara) Systems

Starting with release, there is a user-programmable watchdog timer on sun4v platforms that supports backward compatibility. The user can manipulate the Application Watchdog Timer through IOCTLs provided by the backward compatible ntwdt pseudo driver.

x86: ACPI Thermal Zone Monitor

The minimal ACPI thermal zone monitor pseudo driver for the Solaris OS handles thermal zone events from the ACPI. Thermal zone events are primarily critical temperature events. If the BIOS in a given system implements specific ACPI methods, this pseudo driver handles the thermal zone events.

x86: Adaptec aac Hardware Support

The updated aac driver supports the new generation, rocket chip-based Adaptec Hardware RAID adapter. The aac driver also supports the Adaptec Storage Management Utility (ASM), which configures and monitors the controller and attached hard drives.

For more information, see the Adaptec web-site http://www.adaptec.com/en-US/products/adps/.

x86: Solaris Audio Driver for ATI IXP400

The audioixp driver is the Solaris audio driver for the ATI IXP400 Southbridge chipset from ATI Corporation. The ATI IXP400 chipset includes an embedded AC97 audio controller. This chipset is widely adopted by many motherboard vendors, for example, the Ferrari4000 model. The audioixp driver follows the Solaris Audio Driver Architecture (SADA) frame.

x86: High-Definition Audio Driver

High-definition audio driver, audiohd(7d), is enhanced to support more audio CODECs and provide basic audio playback and recording functionality. The supported high-definition audio CODECs include the following:

x86: SATA AHCI HBA Driver

AHCI is a SATA HBA hot-plug capable driver for SATA controllers that are compatible with the AHCI specification. The AHCI driver supports the INTEL ICH6 and VIA vt8251 controllers, however other AHCI compliant controllers might also work.

For more information, see the ahci(7D) man page.