64-Bit Solaris

SPARC only: 64-Bit Assembler Instructions

The bundled assembler on SPARC systems has been updated to support assembling both 32-bit and 64-bit SPARC assembler programs. The supported instruction sets include SPARC V8, SPARC V9, and the UltraSPARC-specific Visual Instruction Set (VIS) instructions.

Updated Version of the Java^TM Development Kit

The Java Development Kit (JDK), bundled with this release, has been updated to version 1.1.6. In addition to providing greater stability, this version offers significant performance improvements for certain types of applications (like applications that are computationally intensive) due to a number of optimizations made to the JIT compiler.

This version also includes support for large files. Java classes and methods can now access files greater than or equal to 2 GBytes without any API changes. As a result, a Java application run with this version of the JDK will now be able to access large files.

Updated Security In Sendmail

Solaris 7 software includes Sendmail version 8.9.1. In this version, some security checks are tightened by default. For example, forwarding files, .forward, or alias files specified with :include: may need some modification to work properly with this Solaris release.

See the Mail Administration Guide for more information.

Multi-threaded-hot malloc

libmtmalloc provides an alternative dynamic memory allocator for multi-threaded applications. The library provides the traditional API for heap management, malloc, calloc, realloc and free. Unlike libc malloc, libmtmalloc provides concurrent access to the heap-managed area, providing higher performance for a key system utility.

To use this library you must link your application -lmtmalloc. Note that -lmtmalloc must appear on the link line prior to linking with libc -lc.

For more information, see the man page 3t malloc.

Processor Interrupt Control

Processor interrupt control can be used by system administrators and developers of real-time applications to control interrupt distribution in a multiprocessor system. It can improve the performance of applications running on the processors where interrupts were disabled.

It enables users to disable most interrupts on specified processors. This can be done by using the psradm(1m) command or p_online(2) system call for individual processors, or using the psrset(1m) command for all processors in a processor set.

For more information see the man pages, psradm(1M), p_online(2), and psrset(1M) .

Doc Errata for the Solaris 7 Installation Library

In the What's New chapter, "Software Developer Environment," the XIL developer documentation web address has changed to http://www.sun.com/software/imaging. Also, the XIL developer components no longer contain these documents:

• The XIL man pages describing the use of the XIL API

• The XIL Programmer's Guide

The XIL runtime libraries and header remain in Solaris to ensure continuing support for applications employing XIL.

The sentence, "XIL is adding support for stereoscopic image display.", should read, "XIL has added support for stereoscopic image display."

Doc Errata for the System Administration Guide, Vol. II for the Section "Managing System Performance"

In Solaris 7 (Intel Platform Edition), there is a new tunable called kernel base that can be used by system administrators to change the maximum size of kernel or user space.

Intel x86 and compatible processors support only 4GB of virtual address space. By default, in the Solaris operating environment, this is divided into 3.5 GB for user processes and 512 MB for the Solaris kernel. This may not be appropriate for certain workloads. For example, a kernel-based network cache accelerator can benefit from a larger virtual address space for the kernel, while a system with 4GB of physical memory running transaction processing operations using an RDBMS such as Oracle may want to increase space for user processes.

System administrators can change the default allocation through the kernel base property. kernel base defines the beginning of kernel address space; its default value is 0xE0000000. Lowering kernel base below 0xC0000000 makes a system non-ABI compliant and some ABI-compliant user programs may not run.

Use eeprom(1M) to set the tunable kernel base to the desired value (in hexadecimal). The change takes effect when the system is rebooted.