Chapter 1 What's New at a Glance

Writing Device Drivers 

SPARC: The driver hardening test harness is a Solaris device driver development tool. The test harness injects a wide range of simulated hardware faults when the driver under development accesses its hardware. This fault-injection test harness tests the resilience of a SPARC based device driver. 

For more information, see Chapter 4, SPARC: Driver Hardening Test Harness

4/01 

High-availability drivers provides a detailed description of how to design drivers to support high availability through driver hardening and ensuring serviceability. This material extends information provided in the Solaris 8 Writing Device Drivers.

For more information, see Chapter 3, High-Availability Drivers.

10/00 

You can use Generic LAN driver (GLD) to implement much of the STREAMS and Data Link Provider Interface (DLPI) functionality for a Solaris network driver. Until the Solaris 8 10/00 release, the GLD module was available only for Solaris Intel Platform Edition network drivers. Now GLD is available for Solaris SPARC Platform Edition network drivers as well. For the 4/01 release, GLD is updated with bug fixes.

For more information, see Chapter 5, Drivers for Network Devices.

10/00 and updated in 4/01 

Language Support 

The File System Safe Universal Transformation Format, or UTF-8, is an encoding defined by X/Open as a multibyte representation of Unicode. UTF-8 encompasses almost all of the characters for traditional single-byte and multibyte locales for European and Asian languages for Solaris locales. For the 10/00 release, Russian and Polish and two new locales for Catalan are added. For the 4/01 release, two additional languages, Turkish UTF-8 Codeset and Russian UTF-8 Codeset are added to a table of already existing Eastern European locales. 

For more information, see Additional Partial Locales for European Solaris Software.

10/00 and updated in 4/01 

The mp program accepts international text files of various Solaris locales and produces output that is proper for the specified locale. The output will also contain proper text layout, for instance, bidirectional text rendering, and shaping as the complex text layout (CTL) is supported in mp. Depending on each locale's system font configuration for mp, the PostScript^TM output file can contain glyph images from Solaris system-resident scalable or bitmap fonts.

For more information, see Chapter 8, Print Filter Enhancement mp(1).

4/01 

Development Tools 

The appcert utility verifies an object file's conformance to the Solaris ABI. Conforming to the Solaris ABI greatly increases an application's probability of being compatible with future releases of Solaris software.

For more information, see Chapter 10, Using appcert.

4/01 

Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM) includes standards for web-based management of systems, networks, and devices on multiple platforms. The Sun WBEM Software Developer's Toolkit (SDK) enables software developers to create standards-based applications that manage resources in the Solaris operating environment. Developers can also use this toolkit to write providers, programs that communicate with managed resources to access data. The Sun WBEM SDK includes Client Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for describing and managing resources in Common Information Model (CIM), and Provider APIs for getting and setting dynamic data on the managed resource. The Sun WBEM SDK also provides CIM WorkShop, a Java application for creating and viewing the managed resources on a system, and a set of example WBEM client and provider programs.  

For more information, see the Sun WBEM SDK Developer's Guide.

4/01 

SPARC: Multithreaded Programming Guide has been updated with bug fixes: 4308968, 4356675, 4356690.

To view the book, see the Multithreaded Programming Guide

1/01 

The Linkers and Libraries Guide has been updated with several new features.

For more information, see Changes to Linkers and Libraries Guide .

1/01 and 10/00 

System Interface Tools 

The System Interface Guide is updated to incorporate bug fixes. This release corrects several typographical errors in text and source code examples.

To view the book, see System Interface Guide.

6/00 

Java Releases  

The Java 2 SDK^TM Standard Edition v. 1.3.0, also known as J2SE^TM 1.3.0, is an upgrade release for Java 2 SDK. The J2SE release includes the following new features and enhancements.

• Performance Improvements

  Java HotSpot^TM technology- and performance-tuned runtime libraries make J2SE 1.3.0 the fastest Java^TM platform to date.

• Easier Web Deployment

  New features such as applet caching and automatic installation of optional packages by J2SE 1.3.0's Java^TM Plug-in component enhance the speed and flexibility with which you can display programs on the web.

• Enterprise Interoperability

  The addition of RMI/IIOP and the Java Naming and Directory Interface^TM in J2SE 1.3.0 enhance the interoperability of the Java 2 Platform.

• Security Advances

  New support for RSA electronic signing, dynamic trust management, X.509 certificates, and verification of Netscape-signed files mean more ways for developers to protect their electronic data.

• Java Sound

  J2SE 1.3.0 includes a powerful new sound API. Previous releases of the platform limited audio support to basic playback of audio clips. With this release, the Java 2 Platform defines a set of standard classes and interfaces for low-level audio support.

• Enhanced APIs and Improved Ease of Development

  In response to requests from the development community, J2SE 1.3.0 adds new features to various areas of the Java 2 Platform. These features expand the functionality of the platform to enable development of more powerful applications. In addition, many of the new features make the development process itself faster and more efficient.

For more J2SE improvements, see Java 2 SDK, Standard Edition, version 1.3.0.

4/01 

The J2SE 1.2.2_07a contains fixes for bugs that were identified in previous releases in the J2SE 1.2.2 series. An important bug fix is a fix for a performance regression that was introduced in J2SE 1.2.2_05. For more information about bug fixes in J2SE 1.2.2_07a, see this web site: http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.2/ReleaseNotes.html.

4/01 

The Java 2 SDK 1.2.2_06 and JDK 1.1.8_12 are improved with bug fixes since the last release. 

1/01 

The Java 2 SDK 1.2.2_05a includes the following new features.

• Scalability improvements to over 20 CPUs

• Improved just-in time (JIT) compiler optimizations

• Text-rendering performance improvements

• poller class demo package

• Swing improvements

For more information, see Table 18–1.

10/00 

32-bit: With the addition of the mod_jserv module and related files, the Apache web server now supports Java servlets.

For more information, see Java Servlet Support in Apache Web Server.

10/00 

Early Access 

This release includes an Early Access (EA) directory with EA software. For more information, see the Readme on the Solaris Software CD 2 of 2.