What's New in the Solaris 9 Operating Environment

Performance and Scalability Enhancements

Feature Description
IA: Added Support for Physical Address Extension (PAE) Mode With the release of Pentium Pro, Intel introduced a mode called PAE on its advanced processors. By using PAE, Solaris Intel Platform Edition can address up to 32 Gbytes of physical memory.
New Application Debugging Tool: `apptrace` A new application debugging tool, `apptrace`, enables application developers and system support personnel to debug application or system problems by providing call traces to Solaris shared libraries, which might show the series of events leading up to a point of failure.
SPARC: New System Monitoring Tool: `busstat` A new system monitoring tool, `busstat`, provides access to bus-related performance counters on supported SPARC platforms. Viewing these performance counters with `busstat` enables you to measure hardware clock cycles and bus statistics including DMA and cache coherency transactions on a multiprocessor system.
Faster Boot for Servers Large servers now require significantly less time to boot.
New Alternative to `poll()` Interface `/dev/poll` is a second form of polling for the completion of I/O events that provides much higher performance when a very large number of events must be polled for on file descriptors that remain open for a long time. This feature supplements but does not replace `poll`(2).
New Utility: `prstat` The `prstat` utility iteratively examines all active processes on the system and reports various statistics, based on the selected output mode and sort order.
IA: Xeon Enhancements To maximize performance, Solaris 8 Intel Platform Edition now supports the Page Attribute Table (PAT) feature of IA32-bit processors (Pentium II and Pentium III).

Feature Description

IA: Added Support for Physical Address Extension (PAE) Mode

With the release of Pentium Pro, Intel introduced a mode called PAE on its advanced processors. By using PAE, Solaris Intel Platform Edition can address up to 32 Gbytes of physical memory.

New Application Debugging Tool: apptrace

A new application debugging tool, apptrace, enables application developers and system support personnel to debug application or system problems by providing call traces to Solaris shared libraries, which might show the series of events leading up to a point of failure.

SPARC: New System Monitoring Tool: busstat

A new system monitoring tool, busstat, provides access to bus-related performance counters on supported SPARC platforms. Viewing these performance counters with busstat enables you to measure hardware clock cycles and bus statistics including DMA and cache coherency transactions on a multiprocessor system.

Faster Boot for Servers

Large servers now require significantly less time to boot.

New Alternative to poll() Interface

/dev/poll is a second form of polling for the completion of I/O events that provides much higher performance when a very large number of events must be polled for on file descriptors that remain open for a long time. This feature supplements but does not replace poll(2).

New Utility: prstat

The prstat utility iteratively examines all active processes on the system and reports various statistics, based on the selected output mode and sort order.

IA: Xeon Enhancements

To maximize performance, Solaris 8 Intel Platform Edition now supports the Page Attribute Table (PAT) feature of IA32-bit processors (Pentium II and Pentium III).