Solaris 64-bit Operating Environment 

64-bit operating environment (SPARC only) 

The 64-bit Solaris operating environment is a complete 32-bit and 64-bit application and development environment supported by a 64-bit operating system. This permits maximum compatibility and interoperability for existing applications, both source and binary. At the same time, the 64-bit Solaris operating environment overcomes many of the limitations of the 32-bit system, most notably by supporting a 64-bit virtual address space as well as removing other existing 32-bit system limitations. (For SPARC Platform Edition only) 

Web Browser 

Netscape^TM Communicator

Solaris 7 software now ships with Netscape Communicator. 

Network Management and System Administration 

UFS logging 

UFS logging is the process of storing transactions (changes that make up a complete UFS operation) in a log before the transactions are applied to the UFS file system. Once a transaction is stored, the transaction can be applied to the file system later.  

UFS logging provides two advantages. It prevents file systems from becoming inconsistent, therefore eliminating the need to run fsck(1M). And, because fsck can be bypassed, UFS logging reduces the time required to reboot a system if it crashes, or after an unclean halt.

-o noatime UFS mount option

To ignore access time updates on files, you can specify the -o noatime option when mounting a UFS file system. This option reduces disk activity on file systems where access times are unimportant (for example, a Usenet news spool).

LDAP 

The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) is an open-standard, platform-independent, access protocol based on the X.500 informational model. It is designed to run over TCP/IP and uses simple string encodings. LDAP applications are client-server applications and the client library included in this release enables developers to write LDAP applications and users to run LDAP enabled applications. 

Dynamic reconfiguration 

New commands: pgrep and pkill

The pgrep command looks at the active processes on the system and displays the process IDs of the processes whose attributes match the specified criteria on the command line. The pkill command works the same way as the pgrep command except that each matching process ID is signaled by kill(2) instead of having the process ID displayed.

sendmail 8.9

This version includes hooks that enable restriction of spam (unsolicited, bulk email); virtual hosting that allows email to be received using different domain names; and an improved configuration hierarchy that makes building your own sendmail configuration file much easier.

Traceroute utility 

Solaris 7 software bundles the popular traceroute utility. The traceroute utility is used to trace the route an IP packet follows to an Internet host. It is especially useful for determining routing misconfiguration and routing path failures. 

System crash dump utility 

The system crash dump features include the following:

• The dumpadm command enables system administrators to configure crash dumps of the operating system.

• Dump data is now stored in compressed format on the dump device.

• Saving core files is run in the background when a dedicated dump device--not the primary swap area--is part of the dump configuration.

Network Performance 

TCP with SACK 

TCP selective acknowledgment (TCP SACK) provides the support described in RFC 2018 to solve the problems related to congestion and multiple packet drops, especially in applications using TCP large windows (RFC 1323) over satellite links or transcontinental links.  

Network Security  

RPCSEC_GSS

RPC has been modified based on the GSS-API. This increases security integrity and confidentiality, and NFS services are no longer tied down to a specific or a single security mechanism.  

NIS+ extended Diffie-Hellman 

NIS+ enhances NIS+ security by increasing the authentication key length from 192 bits to 640 bits. 

BIND 8.1.2  

Berkeley Internet Name Deamon (BIND), the most popular DNS implementation, has been upgraded to 8.1.2. It provides a new configuration file that enhances network security through the use of access control lists (ACLs). 

Ease-of-Use and Management Improvements 

Installation 

SPARC: Installing a 64-bit operating environment 

The Solaris 7 installation programs have a new check box for selection of 64-bit support; it is selected by default when installing on UltraSPARC^TM platforms.

Installing AnswerBooks with Web Start 

The Web Start product (on the Documentation CD) provides a point-and-click interface with selections for installing the AnswerBook2 server, all document collections on this CD, or selected document collections.  

More locale selections 

In the Solaris 7 release, the English and European localized versions of Solaris software have been combined on a single CD. As a result, more locale selections are available during installation of this combined CD than were seen for Solaris 2.6 software.  

Documentation 

Man pages available in AnswerBook2 format 

Man pages are available in AnswerBook2 (SGML), rather than AnswerBook^TM format. This provides improvements in navigation and links to man pages directly from other AnswerBook2 documents.

Running an AnswerBook2 server directly from the Documentation CD 

With a Documentation CD and root access to the system on which the CD is connected, the AnswerBook2 server can run directly from the CD using the ab2cd script. The documentation can be viewed from the CD.

Ability to use CGI-based web servers 

The AnswerBook2 server can run on top of an existing web server, such as Sun WebServer, rather than requiring an additional web server run on the system solely for AnswerBook2 support.  

Ability to control display of style sheet errors 

An environment variable, AB2_DEBUG, can be set on the AnswerBook2 server. It controls whether style sheet errors are displayed to the user with a red "BUG."

Language Support 

Enhanced language framework 

• Solaris software has expanded its Unicode support with the addition of six new UTF-8 locales: French, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, and Europe. Also, enhanced Unicode locale with multiscript capability is included. Users can input and display text from different writing scripts such as Japanese, Thai, and Russian, and easily switch between the scripts without having to change to or install a new locale.

• Complex text support has been integrated for complex text layout languages such as Arabic, Hebrew, and Thai, which require special text pre-processing to handle bidirectional, composite, and context-sensitive text.

• Solaris 7 software implements the Internet Intranet Input Method Protocol (IIIMP) to enable seamless interoperability between the input methods provided in Solaris, Java, and non-X Windows applications.

• The Desktop Font Downloader enables users to download, remove, re-encode and convert fonts, check status, and perform other administrative tasks on a PostScript^TM printer.

Expanded locale support 

• The European Community (EC) has agreed to standardize on a single currency - the "Euro" currency. Beginning January 1999, all foreign exchange, banking, and finance industries in the EC will convert from using their local currencies to using the Euro. In anticipation of this changeover, Solaris 7 software has added support for the Euro currency with six new user locales.

• Solaris software has added support for the Eastern European, Thai, and the Middle Eastern regions.

Standards 

UNIX 98 branding 

Solaris 7 software is branded UNIX 98. 

Software Developer Environment 

64-bit developer environment (SPARC only) 

The Solaris 7 operating environment provides developers with complete 32-bit and 64-bit development environments. 

Runtime linker  

The runtime linker permits programs to find shared libraries without having to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH and makes the loading of shared libraries even more efficient.

man utility now displays SGML code

The man utility is now able to display man pages that are coded with SGML, as well as the traditional nroff.

Solaris 64-bit X Window libraries 

All of the core X11 shared libraries (.so) and all lint libraries (.ln) for programmers provided in 32-bit versions are available in 64-bit versions for 64-bit Solaris software.

Java Development Kit for Solaris performance improvements 

The Java Development Kit 1.1.5 for Solaris has been specially tuned and tested. As a result, it offers significantly improved scalability and performance for Java applications developed for, and deployed in, the enterprise and across the network. 

WebNFS^TM Software Development Kit included

The WebNFS Software Development Kit (SDK) provides remote file access for Java applications using WebNFS. Since it implements the NFS^TM protocol directly, it requires no NFS support on the host system.

truss now performs function-call tracing

The truss utility traces the system calls, signals, and machine faults of a process. It has been enhanced with a new option to enable entry and exit tracing of user-level function calls executed by the traced process.

Improved device configuration library 

The libdevinfo library, used to obtain device configuration information, has been made more robust and comprehensive in Solaris 7 software. For more information, see the man page libdevinfo(3).

Graphics/Imaging 

XIL^TM

The XIL foundation imaging library is suitable for libraries or applications requiring imaging or digital video, such as document imaging, color prepress, or digital video generation and playback. 

New support for stereoscopic image display enables the presentation of image pairs representing a left-eye/right-eye view. This provides an image display with depth perception. 

The XIL Developer's Kit is now separate from Solaris and is available free of charge. 

Desktop 

Common Desktop Environment, (CDE) 

CDE contains new tools to make it easy to find, manipulate, and manage address cards, applications, email addresses, files, folders, hosts, processes, and web addresses. 

Included in CDE is support for Motif 2.1, which includes five new Motif widgets and is MT-safe. Motif 2.1 supports ISO standard Complex Text Language locales in which a single binary developed on the Solaris 7 operating environment provides advanced and standard support for Hebrew, Arabic, and Thai customers. 

Printing 

Enhanced Font Management 

The Desktop Font Downloader allows users to download, remove, re-encode and convert fonts, check status, and perform other administrative tasks on a PostScript^TM printer.

Intel Platform Edition Hardware Support 

SCSI disk driver sd

The sd SCSI disk target driver, formerly supplied only on Solaris (SPARC Platform Edition) systems, is now used for SCSI disk support and ATAPI CD-ROM support in place of cmdk. The cmdk driver is still available to support non-SCSI hard disks.

Intelligent I/O framework support 

Intelligent I/O (I2O) is an emerging standard for modular, high-performance I/O subsystems. This feature, which is dependent on I2O-capable hardware, is only available for Solaris (Intel Platform Edition).  

Java 

Java Virtual Machine 

HotJava^TM browser

Intranet/Internet Services 

WebNFS^TM software

The WebNFS software enables file systems to be accessed through the Web using the NFS protocol. This protocol is very reliable and provides greater throughput under a heavy load.  

Performance Improvements 

Database Performance 

UFS direct I/O 

For UFS files, direct I/O enables a program to read and write data directly from and to the disk, bypassing the virtual memory buffer cache. An example of a bulk I/O operation is downloading large amounts of satellite data to a file. 

Raw I/O 

Improvements were made to low-level I/O support routines that dramatically improve throughput for I/O to disk devices without a file system (raw devices often used for database files.). The driver for the SPARCstorage^TM Array was rewritten to improve its throughput.

Network/Web Performance 

Kernel sockets 

The kernel sockets implementation provides improved compatibility with SunOS^TM 4.x and BSD sockets, and enables higher socket performance.

TCP large windows 

TCP large windows provides the support described in RFC1323. It improves performance over high-bandwidth networks such as ATM, or high-delay networks such as satellite links, by using windows that exceed the normal 64-Kbyte limit. 

Zero copy TCP/hardware checksum 

Zero copy TCP has been used to eliminate copying from user-space to kernel-space.  

Support for hardware checksum has been added as well. Performance is improved by avoiding software computation of the checksum, off-loading the work to a network adapter that supports it. This is currently only supported on the SunATM^TM card.

Ease-of-Use and Management Improvements 

Installation 

Solaris Web Start browser-based installation 

Solaris Web Start is a browser-based utility that guides users through selection and installation of both Solaris and bundled application software. 

Installation documentation 

x86 device configuration 

The Configuration Assistant interface is part of the new booting system for the Solaris (Intel Platform Edition) software. It determines which hardware devices are in the machine, accounts for the resources each device uses, and enables users to choose which device to boot from. 

x86 configuring peripherals 

The kdmconfig program is used to configure the mouse, graphics adapter, and monitor on an x86 system. If an Owconfig file already exists, kdmconfig will extract any usable information from it. In addition, this updated version of kdmconfig will also retrieve information left in the devinfo tree by the devconf program, and use that information to automatically identify devices.

Changed Solaris CD layout 

Slice 0 on the Solaris CD has been reorganized to make it more intuitive and extensible. 

Upgrade with disk space reallocation 

The upgrade option provides an auto-layout feature to reallocate disk space if the current file systems don't have enough space for the upgrade.

Testing upgrade profiles 

The pfinstall command is now available to test profiles that use the upgrade option.

Changing a system's boot device 

A system's boot device is now changeable during installation. 

Preconfiguring system Configuration information 

Using the sysidcfg file, you can now preconfigure system configuration information through a set of keywords. You can choose to provide one or more of the keywords to preconfigure varying levels of system information.

Optional 8-bit locales 

Documentation 

AnswerBook2 documentation 

Solaris online documentation can be accessed with any popular browser. The AnswerBook2 viewer uses a web browser-based interface that enables users to view and print a variety of Solaris information, including existing AnswerBook^TM documents and man pages.

Desktop 

Common Desktop Environment (CDE) 

Solaris CDE is an advanced Motif-based desktop with an easy-to-use interface that provides a consistent look and feel across UNIX® platforms. With Solaris CDE you can run OpenWindows^TM applications without modifications. In addition, CDE applications are integrated with the Web; for example, you can click on an HTTP address in a CDE Mailer message and a browser will open to the selected address.

Power Management^TM for SPARC desktops

Power Management software enables users to be more frugal with power consumption on desktop systems when they are not being used. By default, all UltraSPARC^TM desktop systems power off when left alone for 30 minutes. Users can modify or turn off Power Management if needed.

OpenWindows desktop 

The OpenWindows 3.6 desktop and libraries have been updated with bug fixes and prepared for the year 2000. 

New user locales  

Ten new locales are added for Eastern European, Russian, Greek, and Baltic states. 

Two locales that are Unicode 2.0 and ISO 10646 compliant have been added. These locales enable multiscript input and output and are the first locales provided in the Solaris environment with this capability. These locales support the CDE environment only, including the Motif and CDE libraries 

Font administration 

- Font Admin enables easy installation and usage of fonts for the X Window System. It supports TrueType, Type0, Type1, and CID fonts for multibyte languages, and provides comparative font preview capability. It is fully integrated into the CDE desktop. 

- TrueType fonts are supported through X and Display PostScript. Font Admin enables easy installation and integration of third-party fonts into the Solaris environment. 

Solaris 2.6 software has been re-architected to the historical dependency on the Extended UNIX Codeset (EUC). Additional codeset support and locales for popular Asian PC encoding standards (ShiftJIS (PCK) in Japan, Big5 in PRC, and Johap) in Korea are also provided. These locales support the CDE environment only, including the Motif and CDE libraries. 

Standards 

X/Open UNIX 95 

(Spec 1170) 

The previous release of the Solaris software was compliant with much of Spec 1170. The Solaris 2.6 release now meets all the requirements. 

X/Open XFN CAE 

Federated Naming Service (FNS) is now compliant with the X/Open XFN CAE definition.  

POSIX 1003.1b 

POSIX real-time functionality is added. This includes full support for POSIX AIO (with the exception of the -PRIORITIZED I/O option) and some new extensions to support 64-bit files, (see "Large Files").

The ISO 10646 standard defines Unicode 2.0, including UCS-2 and UTF-8 (the standard UNIX implementation). All implementations specified in this standard are Unicode 2.0 compliant. 

Robust Software Developer Environment 

Large files 

Large files are supported on UFS, NFS^TM, and CacheFS^TM file systems. The interfaces defined by the Large File Summit are supported.

Versioning/scoped libraries 

Scheduler activations 

Scheduler activations provide additional kernel scheduling support for multithreaded applications.  

Pre-emption control 

Pre-emption control allows application control over kernel pre-emption. 

/proc File system and watchpoints

The previous flat /proc file system has been restructured into a directory hierarchy that contains additional subdirectories for state information and control functions. It also provides a watchpoint facility to monitor access to and modifications of data in the process address space. The adb(1) command uses this facility to provide watchpoints.

Federated naming service (FNS) 

Solaris Developer Kit (SDK) 

The SDK software is now built into the Solaris operating environment and is no longer an unbundled product. All the information a developer needs to produce applications and graphics handlers for end-user Solaris runtime environments is now available in this Solaris release. 

Graphics 

XGL^TM

The XGL 2-D and 3-D immediate-mode API provides portability across hardware platforms and optimal performance from graphics acceleration. The XGL API includes support for raster text, environment and vertex-level texture mapping, four-component texture mapping, DGA transparent overlay, and triangle list Gcache. 

XIL 

The XIL foundation imaging library is suitable for libraries or applications requiring imaging or digital video, such as document imaging, color prepress, or digital video generation and playback. The following features are new in the Solaris 2.6 release. The XIL 1.3 library:  

- Is MT-hot 

- Supports the 32-bit, single-precision, floating-point data type 

- Supports temporary images 

- Supports the new XIL_GENERAL storage format

- Includes Kodak Color Management System^TM (KCMS) support

- Supports the new XIL_BAND_SEQUENTIAL storage format for all data types

- Saves on memory use with tiled storage 

PEX^TM 3.0.2 runtime environment

The PEX application programmer interface (API) provides application portability across platforms and 3-D graphics on local and remote displays. 

KCMS multithreaded programming 

KCMS now supports multithreaded programs: it is multithread safe (MT-safe). A KCMS application using multithreaded capabilities does not require locks around KCMS library calls. 

X11R6 base window system 

The X11R6 Base Windowing System includes the latest fixes and patches from the X Consortium. 

X11 double buffer extension 

The double buffer extension (DBE) provides a standard way to use double-buffering within the framework of the X Window System. Double-buffering uses two buffers, called "front" and "back," that hold images. The front buffer is visible to the user; the back buffer is not. A detailed specification is available via an Internet browser at ftp://ftp.x.org/pub/DOCS/DBE/

Large Files Support 

Large files 

Large files are supported on UFS, NFS, and CacheFS file systems. Applications can create and access files up to one Tbyte on UFS-mounted file systems and up to the limit of the NFS server for NFS- and CacheFS-mounted file systems. A new -mount option is available to disable the large-file support on UFS file systems. This -mount option gives the system administrator a way to ensure that older applications that are not able to safely handle large files will not accidentally operate on large files.

64-bit AIO 

The Solaris operating environment provides a new set of interfaces for developers who want to do asynchronous I/O to large files. These interfaces are integrated with KAIO in an implementation technique that optimizes I/O to raw files. They are automatically selected by either the Solaris AIO interfaces or the new POSIX AIO interfaces. KAIO is the optimized path for doing I/O to raw files. When using the interfaces with KAIO to raw files, there is a significant performance improvement. 

Network Security  

NFS Kerberos 

Kerberos authentication uses DES encryption to improve security over the network. The kernel implementations of NFS and RPC network services now support a new RPC authentication flavor that is based on the Generalized Security Services API (GSS-API). This support contains the hooks to add stronger security to the NFS environment. 

RPCSEC_GSS

The user-level RPC implementation supports a new authentication flavor. This flavor is based on the GSS-API and provides the hooks to add stronger authentication, privacy, and integrity for RPC-based services. 

Authentication modules (PAM)  

The PAM framework enables you to "plug in" new authentication technologies. 

BIND version 4.9.4-P1 

Berkeley Internet Name Daemon (BIND), the most popular DNS implementation, has been upgraded to 4.9.4-P1. It addresses many of the security problems found in earlier versions of the implementation.  

Network Management and System Administration 

Network time protocol (NTP) 

Solaris software now supports NTP, which provides both precise time and/or network clock synchronization for use in distributed computing environments. In the past, Solaris customers could use a publicly available version of NTP. The new support provides increased time precision. 

Solstice^TM Enterprise Agents^TM

Solstice Enterprise Agents (SEA) is based on the new extensible agent technology or master/subagent technology. SEA is for component developers and system and network managers who want to develop custom Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), or Desktop Management Interface (DMI) subagents, to instrument different components, subsystems, and applications within a device to enable management from an SNMP management console. 

DHCP  

Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) enables a host to get an Internet protocol address and other system configuration parameters without preconfiguration by the administrator.  

NFS client failover 

Client failover provides a high level of availability of read-only file systems by enabling the client to automatically mount the file system from another server if the first server becomes unavailable. 

Variable length subnet mask (VLSM) 

VLSM enables more efficient use of IP address space by enabling the TCP/IP administrator to use Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) to partition this space in a flexible manner. 

Routing sockets 

Conformance with the de facto routing socket interface as implemented by 4.4 BSD, which allows use of CIDR-aware routing protocols such as OSPF, BGP-4, and RIPv2, is now included. 

autofs

The new autofs automount daemon is now fully multithreaded. This enables concurrent servicing of multiple mount requests and increases reliability.

Processor sets 

Processor sets give the system administrator control over the allocation of processes to sets of processors. 

NIS+ backup/fast restore

NIS+ backup and restore provide a quick and efficient method of backing up and restoring NIS+ namespaces.

NIS+ over a wide area network (WAN) 

Server-use customization enables NIS+ administrators to specify NIS+ server search order for clients that need naming services. Server use can be balanced among various clients by designating different servers for different clients as "preferred" (primary). If a client cannot obtain information from its preferred servers, the order in which the client seeks out other servers can be specified. This feature is particularly useful when a NIS+ domain spans a WAN link, because administrators can reduce network traffic over the WAN link by specifying that clients first try to obtain the naming service from servers on the client's side of the link. 

NIS server 

Solaris software now natively supports the NIS server. In previous Solaris releases, the NIS server was supported under emulation mode by the NIS+ server or using an unbundled product named NSkit. 

CFS boot 

CFS Boot enables AutoClient^TM systems to boot more quickly with less network traffic by booting from a local CacheFS disk cache. The first system boot populates the cache. System boots that follow are satisfied from the cache.

Patch tools 

Patch tools, including patchadd and patchrm commands to add and remove patches, are now part of the Solaris software, rather than shipping with each individual patch as installpatch and backoutpatch commands.

isalist utilities

isalist is a set of utilities that enables users to find out which instruction sets are supported on their machines and also to determine which one performs best for them.

Printing 

Printing 

The Solaris 2.6 print software offers a better solution than the LP print software in previous Solaris releases. System administrators can easily set up and manage print clients using the NIS or NIS+ name services. This means print administration can be centralized for a network of systems and printers. New features include:  

- Redesign of print packages 

- Print protocol adapter 

- SunSoft^TM Print Client

- Network printer support 

Hardware Support 

PCMCIA PC card 

PCMCIA delivers a PCMCIA supplement into a Solaris Device Driver Kit to enable OEMs and third parties to develop PC Card device drivers that will be source-compatible across all Solaris platforms. 

Nomadic Support 

filesync

filesync ensures that data is moved automatically between a portable computer and a server.

Security 

Large user IDs and group ID 

The limit on User ID and Group ID values has been raised to 2147483647, or the maximum value of a signed integer. The nobody user and group (60001) and the no access user and group (60002) retain the same UIDs and GIDs as previous Solaris 2.x releases.

Graphics/Imaging 

KCMS calibrator tool 

KCMS includes a loadable driver module for the X-Rite DTP92 Incident Colorimeter. The driver supports the X-Rite colorimeter, which connects to the serial port to obtain color measurement data.  

Includes new procedures for adding and removing color calibration modules to the system configuration file, OWconfig.