Solaris 10 5/09 What's New

Driver Enhancements

The following driver features and enhancements have been added to the Solaris 10 5/09 release.

hermon Driver

This feature introduces a Solaris driver for the fourth generation of InifiniBand (IB) HCA chips from Mellanox, Ltd. The hermon driver provides IB support for SDR, DDR, and QDR chips for conventional HCAs, EMs, and NEMs for blade environments.

The hermon driver enables higher bandwidth and lower latency in IB transmissions, compared to previous generations of the IB product. The higher bandwidth and lower latency are most important in high-performance computing (HPC) applications, though the increase in performance is advantageous in all environments.

In addition, the uDAPL library, a critical underpinning of the MPI library, is updated to work with this driver, providing optimal performance with MPI-based applications.

iSCSI Target

Starting with the Solaris 10 5/09 release, iSCSI Target is upgraded to provide new features and functionality.

This iSCSI Target update includes the following performance, scalability, interoperability, and reliability improvements:

The Solaris iSCSI Target release now supports a wide variety of iSCSI initiators for the following operating systems:

x86: NetXen 10-GigE Device Driver

The ntxn(7D) is a new NIC driver that supports NetXen's PCI Express-based 10-Gigabit Ethernet network interface cards (NIC). Users can access the network through Solaris OS on platforms that have a NetXen NIC installed.

Intel ICH10 and Hartwell NIC Support in E1000g Driver

Starting with the Solaris 10 5/09 release, the ICH10 and Hartwell network interfaces are the default network interface cards (NIC) on some x64 and x86 machines. Users can access the network easily with these network interfaces.

xge Driver Can Enable Multiple Receive Rings and MSI-X

The xge driver enables multiple receive rings and MSI-X if the driver can allocate enough MSI-X vectors on platforms that support MSI-X.. The performance of the driver is enhanced by this feature. If the driver is unable to allocate enough MSI-X vectors, the driver continues to work as before in the legacy interrupt mode.