The Solaris operating environment offers value-added components in addition to the SVR4-based operating system. These make computing easier and create new opportunities for users, system administrators, and developers.
In general, the merge of established UNIX variants into SVR4 and the Solaris operating environment was done by consolidating the existing functionality while maintaining compatibility for existing applications. As a result, features and commands were added to the product with few features being withdrawn.
For users, the Solaris operating environment incorporates a suite of powerful DeskSet applications to enhance personal productivity. All DeskSet applications rely on the drag-and-drop metaphor, enabling users to carry out complex UNIX commands with a mouse. Specifically, some of the features are:
A workspace manager. Provides basic window management services (open, close, move, and so on), as well as tools that enables user to customize their workspace.
Desktop integration services. These include ToolTalk, drag and drop, and cut and paste, providing the foundation that enables applications to seamlessly integrate with one another.
Graphics libraries. These include XGL(TM), Xlib, PEX(TM), and XIL(TM), providing support for 2D and 3D graphics applications.
Calendar Manager. A time management application that displays appointments and ToDo items for a day, week, or a month at a glance. It also contains a multibrowse feature that makes scheduling meetings among a group of users easy. Multiple calendars can be overlaid simultaneously to determine convenient meeting time slots at a glance.
Image Tool. Enables you to load, view and save images of over 40 different formats including PICT, PostScript(TM), TIFF, GIF, JFIF, and many more.
For system administrators, the Solaris operating environment offers a variety of new tools to simplify the administration of a distributed computing environment. These include:
Device information. Administrators can use these optional utilities to obtain information about installed devices including device names, attributes, and accessibility. Administration can be simplified by creating device allocation pools, a feature not previously found in UNIX systems.
File system administration. These utilities enable administrators to create, copy, mount, debug, repair, and unmount file systems; create and remove hard file links and named pipes; and manage volumes.
Interprocess communication. Two interprocess communication utilities create, remove, and report on the status of the system's interprocess communication facilities (message queues, semaphores, and shared memory IDs). They provide information helpful in tuning the system.
Process management. The process management utilities help you control system scheduling. Using these utilities, administrators can generate reports on performance, logins, disk access locations, and seek distances to better tune system performance. In addition, you can change the system run level, kill active processes, time the execution of commands, and change the default scheduling priorities of kernel, timesharing, and real-time processes.
System accounting. The accounting utilities enable system administrators to track system usage by CPU, user, and process for better resource allocation.
System information. These utilities report system memory and system configuration. The system administrator can use the utilities to change the names of the systems and the network node.
User and group management. With these utilities, a system administrator can create and delete entries in group and password databases, specify default home directories and environments, maintain user and system logins, and assign group and user IDs. The utilities support both primary and supplementary user groups.
Admintool. Admintool, which runs under the OpenWindows environment, provides system management facilities to help add hosts, manage the network, and perform many other routine tasks on local systems.
Auto configuration. The Solaris operating environment has a dynamic kernel, which means that it loads drivers and other modules into memory when the devices are accessed. You no longer need to rebuild the kernel after installation, nor must you add or remove drivers.
Network Information Services Plus (NIS+). An upward-compatible version of the NIS name service with simpler hierarchical administration, improved security, and faster updates.
Installation. The Solaris operating environment has an install GUI to ease installation or upgrades. Automatic installations and upgrades are also possible over the network.
Security. The automated security enhancement tool (ASET) is a utility that improves security by allowing system administrators to check system file settings including permissions, ownership, and file contents. ASET warns users about potential security problems and, where appropriate, sets the system file permissions autonomically according to the specified security level.
For application developers, the Solaris operating environment includes a variety of toolkits and features to simplify the development of complex applications with graphical user interfaces.
Multithreaded (MT) kernel. MT provides for a symmetric multiprocessing kernel where multiple processors can execute the kernel at the same time. Applications can be structured as several independent computations rather than as one thread of control. Independent computations execute more efficiently because the operating system handles the interleaving of the independent operations. This benefit of multithreading is known as application concurrency.
STREAMS. STREAMS is a flexible framework for character input and output (I/O) that has been implemented throughout SVR4. It is easily customized for applications.
Expanded fundamental types. ID data types (uid, pid, device IDs, and the like) and certain other data types are expanded to 32 bits. This improves the scalability of the operating system in large systems and for use in large organizations.
Device driver interfaces. There are three types of interfaces for Solaris device drivers: Device Kernel Interface (DKI) Device Driver Interface/Device Kernel Interface (DDI/DKI), and Sun Device Driver Interface (Sun DDI). The DDI/DKI conformance means that device drivers have better source and binary compatibility across SPARC platforms so developers can write one driver to support a peripheral on all SPARC platforms.