Standards

Many customers rely on the Solaris operating environment as the foundation for mission critical applications. New standards in the Solaris operating environment show Sun's continuing involvement in providing a stable operating environment. Continuous improvements in support for standards are shown in these new features.

Year 2000 Ready

Sun's Solaris 2.6 operating environment is year 2000 ready. The Solaris 2.6 release uses unambiguous dates and follows the X/Open guidelines where appropriate. For further information, including the definition of year-2000 compliance, see the Year 2000 web page at http://www.sun.com/y2000.

X/Open UNIX 95 (Spec 1170)

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

Areas changed in the Solaris 2.6 release to meet the Spec 1170 requirements:

• System interfaces and headers

  System headers were updated to bring them up to compliance with Spec 1170.

• X/Open curses

  A new library has been added to support the interfaces defined by this specification. Significant support for internationalized curses capabilities, pads, terminfo database access, and color manipulation has been added.

• Networking services

  • New X/Open standardized socket and IP address resolution interfaces are available.

  • The X/Open Transport Interface (XTI) is an evolution and standardization of the set of interfaces that were supported by the Transport Layer Interface (TLI) in SVR4. TLI continues to be available for compatibility, but new development should use XTI.

    For more information, see Transport Interfaces Programming Guide.

X/Open XFN CAE

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

POSIX 1003.1b

POSIX 1003.1b support is completed. The Solaris software has provided all of the interfaces for POSIX 1003.1b since the Solaris 2.3 release. A subset of those interfaces was functional in that they provided services instead of returning "Not Supported." This release finishes support for POSIX 1003.1b (with the exception of the -PRIORITIZED IO option).

This standards feature is of interest to developers interested in writing portable, standards-compliant code. It is also of interest to developers interested in higher performance message passing or semaphore code who otherwise would use System V messages or semaphores and who can accept the more limited functionality offered by POSIX.

As of the Solaris 2.6 release, POSIX 1003.1b support is provided for the following:

• Asynchronous I/O (except prioritized I/O)

• Mapped files

• Memory locking

• Memory protection

• Message passing

• Priority scheduling

• Realtime signals

• Semaphores

• File synchronization

• Shared memory objects

• Synchronized I/O

• Timers

Support for many of these features has been available in the Solaris operating environment for several releases in a non-standards-conformant way.

ISO 10646

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.