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Solaris Express Developer Edition What's New

What's New in Solaris Express

This document summarizes all features in the current Software Express release. The current release is the SolarisTM Express Developer Edition 1/08 release.

The Solaris Express Developer Edition (Developer release) provides a simple initial installation of the Solaris OS for your laptop. Combined with community and Sun support and training services, this release includes the tools, technologies, and platforms enables developer to create custom Solaris, JavaTM, and Web 2.0 applications.

The Developer release includes the following operating system, desktop, and developer tools:

To learn more about the Java DS features, see http://opensolaris.org/os/project/jds/.

Note –

New Features in Solaris Express Developer Edition 1/08

Solaris Trusted Extensions Administrator's Procedures

This system administration enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

Starting with this release, the Solaris Trusted Extensions packages are installed when the Solaris OS is installed. The ExtraValue directory is no longer present. This directory previously included the Solaris Trusted Extensions packages. The Solaris Trusted Extensions functionality is managed by the service management facility (SMF) as the svc:/system/labeld:default service. This service must be enabled. After the service is in the online state, reboot the system to activate Solaris Trusted Extensions. Additional configuration is required after the reboot. For more information, see Part I, Initial Configuration of Trusted Extensions, in Solaris Trusted Extensions Administrator’s Procedures.

The Developer 1/08 release also includes the following features:

For more information about Solaris Trusted Extensions, see Solaris Trusted Extensions Administrator’s Procedures.

Network Data Management Protocol Service

This system administration enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

The Network Data Management Protocol (NDMP) is a standard for backing up data, usually to tape, from network clients. With NDMP running as a service, any NDMP-compliant data management application on the network is a client and can back up its data to the NDMP server, a Sun StorageTek NAS appliance.

StarOffice 8

This desktop tools enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

Starting with this release, StarOffice 8 has been enhanced to include a new Chart engine.

For more information about the new Chart engine, see http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Chart2/Features2.3. For more information about StarOffice, see http://www.sun.com/software/star/staroffice/whats_new.jsp.

GNOME 2.20

This desktop tools enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

GNOME 2.20 is the latest version of the multi-platform desktop environment, GNOME Desktop. GNOME 2.20 contains the following features:

Enhancements to the Solaris ZFS File System

This sections describes new ZFS features in the Developer 1/08 release.

See the following What's New sections for related ZFS feature information:

x86: Support for Suspend-to-RAM “Sleep” Feature

This system resource enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

Starting with this release, the Solaris OS includes support for the Suspend to RAM (S3) “Sleep” feature. This feature is supported on Solaris x86 based platforms that include compliant drivers, for example the Sun UltraTM 20 M2 Workstation. For a driver to be considered compliant, the driver must support a specific feature set.

For more information, see Chapter 12, Power Management, in Writing Device Drivers.

Note –

As platforms become compliant, they will be added to the list of supported workstations.

x86: Virtualization Using the Sun xVM Hypervisor

This system resource enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

The goal of virtualization is to move from managing individual datacenter components to managing pools of resources. By consolidating multiple hosts and services on a single machine, virtualization reduces costs through the sharing of hardware, infrastructure, and administration.

The Sun xVM Hypervisor is based on the work of the Xen open source community. In a running system, the Hypervisor fits between the hardware and the operating system instance. The Hypervisor can securely execute multiple virtual machines simultaneously on a single x86-compatible computer, with each virtual machine running its own operating system.

Each virtual machine instance is called a domain. There are two kinds of domains. There is one control domain, also called domain 0, or dom0. A guest operating system is called a guest domain, also referred to as domain U or domU. You can have multiple guest domains on your system.

Within Hypervisor based solutions, there are two basic types of virtualization, full virtualization and paravirtualization. The Hypervisor supports both modes. A system can have both paravirtualized and fully virtualized domains running simultaneously.

The xVM Hypervisor virtualizes the system's hardware. This means that it transparently shares and partitions the system's resources, such as CPUs, memory, and NICs, among the guest domains.

The Hypervisor runs on x64 and x86 based systems. Supported configurations include Solaris dom0, and Solaris domU, Linux domU, FreeBSD domU, and Windows domU guests. Solaris zones and branded zones can be run within a Solaris domU.

For more information, see the following:

x86: Enhanced Speedstep CPU Power Management

This device management enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

Stating with this release, Intel's Enhanced SpeedstepTM technology is supported on Solaris. Enhanced Speedstep support enables Solaris users to manage the power consumption of their Intel processors by lowering the processor frequency during idle periods.

For more information on how to enable Solaris CPU power management, see the power.conf(4) man page.

Faulty Device Retirement Feature

This device management enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

Starting with this release, the Solaris OS includes a new device retirement mechanism to isolate a device as faulty by the fault management framework (FMA). This feature allows faulty devices to be safely and automatically inactivated to avoid data loss, data corruption, or panics and system down time. The retirement process is done safely, taking into account the stability of the system after the device has been retired.

Critical devices are never retired. If you need to manually replace a retired device, use the fmadm repair command after the device replacement so that system knows that the device is replaced, in addition to the manual replacement steps.

The fmadm repair process is as follows:

For more information, see fmadm(1M).

A general message regarding device retirement is displayed on the console and written to the /var/adm/messages file so that you aware of a retired device. For example:


Aug 9 18:14 starbug genunix: [ID 751201 kern.notice] 
NOTICE: One or more I/O devices have been retired

You can use the prtconf command to identify specific retired devices. For example:


# prtconf
.
.
.
pci, instance #2
        scsi, instance #0
            disk (driver not attached)
            tape (driver not attached)
            sd, instance #3
            sd, instance #0 (retired)
        scsi, instance #1 (retired)
            disk (retired)
            tape (retired)
    pci, instance #3
        network, instance #2 (driver not attached)
        network, instance #3 (driver not attached)
    os-io (driver not attached)
    iscsi, instance #0
    pseudo, instance #0
.
.
.

Sun StorageTek Traffic Manager

This device management enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

Starting with this release, the mechanisms described in scsi_vhci(7D) to override the autoconfiguration behavior have changed. Existing customization will be converted to the new mechanism on upgrade.

For more information, see the scsi_vhci(7D) man page and Solaris SAN Configuration and Multipathing Guide.

Improved IPsec NAT-Traversal

This networking enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

Starting with this release, IPsec Key Management applications can now enable or disable NAT-Traversal through a UDP socket option, and enable the correct PF_KEY extensions on their IPsec Security Associations.

Inetd Backlog Queue Size

This networking enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

Starting with this release, a tunable to set the backlog queue size of the inetd managed services is introduced. This feature adds an SMF property to inetd called connection_backlog using which the queue size can be modified. The default value of the connection_backlog queue size is 10. You can modify the connection_backlog property by using the inetadm command. For example:

For more information, see the inetadm(1M) man page.

Xvnc Server and Vncviewer Client

This X11 windowing enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

VNC provides a remote desktop session over the Remote Frame Buffer (RFB) protocol. RFB clients, better known as VNC viewers, are available for most platforms, in both open source and commercial releases.

The Developer 1/08 release now includes Xvnc, an X server based on the open source releases from the RealVNC project and X.Org Foundation, that displays to a RFB protocol client over the network, without requiring an existing X server session displayed on local video hardware. This release also includes the RealVNC vncviewer RFB client to connect to remote VNC servers, and several associated programs for managing these.

For more information, see System Administration Guide: Virtualization Using the Solaris Operating System. See also, the Xvnc(1) and vncviewer(1) man pages.

64-bit SPARC: Memory Placement Optimization Support For sun4v Platforms

This system performance enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

Memory Placement Optimization (MPO) enables operating systems to allocate memory local to the core where the threads or processes are executing The sun4v architecture runs on virtualized hardware environment. The MPO for sun4v platforms feature provides the required standard accessors in the sun4v layer to provide locality information for the generic MPO framework. This feature is effective on the platforms where multiple sockets with memory access latency differences exist. The MPO feature enhances the performance of various applications by enabling the OS to allocate memory local to the nodes.

Solaris CIFS Service

This file system enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

The Solaris CIFS service provides a native, well-integrated CIFS service to support Windows, MacOS, and other CIFS clients. This service offers ubiquitous access to files that are shared between CIFS and NFS clients. The Solaris CIFS server can act as a member server within an Active Directory domain. The Solaris CIFS service provides file system access to Windows and Mac OS clients through CIFS shares with support for both local and Active Directory domain authentication.

Similar to NFS, CIFS provides network file system services. CIFS also provides services, such as network transport for sub-protocols like named pipes, MS-RPC services, and interfaces to core Windows functionality.

For more information, see the following:

Solaris Trusted Extensions Supports Mounting Labeled Filesystems With the NFSv3 Protocol

This security enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

Starting with this release, the Solaris Trusted Extensions software can mount labeled file systems by using NFS Version 3 (NFSv3) in addition to NFS Version 4 (NFSv4). Solaris Trusted Extensions has no restrictions in using TCP as an underlying transport protocol for NFS. However, users cannot choose UDP as the underlying protocol for read-down NFS access for NFSv3. The use of UDP for the initial mount operation is supported, but UDP is not supported for subsequent multilevel NFSv3 operations.

VSCAN Service

This security enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

The Solaris OS now supports integrated virus scanning of ZFS-resident files by using the ICAP protocol to send candidate files to external third-party, off-the-shelf virus scanning products.

For more information, see the following:

SPARC: Hardware Accelerated Elliptical Curve Cryptography (ECC) Support

This security enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

The UltraSPARC-T2 based platforms support hardware acceleration of Elliptical Curve Cryptography (ECC) algorithms. The Solaris OS now supports high performance ECDSA and ECDH on these platforms. These new ECC algorithms are accessible to all users of the Solaris Cryptographic Framework including JAVA and OpenSSL users.

Unicode-Encoding Conversion Kernel Functions

This kernel functions enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

Starting with this release, a set of Unicode-encoding conversion kernel and user land functions is available for the UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32 Unicode encodings. Big-endian and little-endian variations of the encodings and Byte Order Mark processing are also supported.

For more information, see the uconv_u16tou32(9F) and uconv_u16tou32(3C) man pages.

Unicode UTF-8 Text Preparation Kernel Functions

This kernel functions enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

This feature introduces a new set of kernel and user land functions that can be used to perform Unicode Normalizations and Unicode simple-case conversions on UTF-8 text. There are also functions for UTF-8 string comparison and validation with various options.

For more information, see the following man pages:

Squid Cache

This Web Stack enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

Squid is a fully-featured HTTP/1.0 proxy. Squid offers a rich access control, authorization and logging environment to develop web proxy and content serving applications.

For more information, see http://www.squid-cache.org/Versions/v2/2.6/cfgman/.

32-bit: PHP 5

This Web Stack enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

Starting with this release, the Solaris OS includes PHP 5. PHP Hypertext Preprocessor is a popular scripting language for web application development.

For more information, see http://www.php.net/.

Ruby 1.8.6 and Rubygems 0.9.4

This Web Stack enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

Starting with this release, the Ruby programming language, certain extensions, the Rails application framework, and the Rubygems package management system are supported.

For more information, see the following:

Apache 2.2 HTTP Server

This Web Stack enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

Starting with this release, the Solaris OS includes the Apache 2.2.6 HTTP server. The Apache server supports multiple MPMs, PHP, prefork, and worker.

For more information, see http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/.

MySQL 5.0.45

This Web Stack enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

Starting with this release, the Solaris OS includes the MySQL 5.0.45 Relational Database Management Syatems.

Perl Database Interface and PostgreSQL Driver for Perl

This additional software enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

Perl Database Interface (DBI) is a generic database interface to talk to specific DB back-end. DBD::Pg is a PostgreSQL driver that will enable Perl applications to interact with PostgreSQL back-end through DBI.

For more information, see the following:

x86: GLDv3 Version bnx II Driver

This driver enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

The Broadcom NetXtreme (bnx) II Ethernet driver is converted to GLDv3. This conversion includes some features in GLDv3 that are useful for systems based on bnx(7d) such as full support for VLANs and 802.3 link aggregation. This is also useful for additional stack features such as IP instances.

For more information, see the bnx(7D) man page.

ADMtek Fast Ethernet Driver

This driver enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

Starting with this release, the afe(7D) driver is introduced. The afe(7D) supports network interfaces based on ADMtek Centaur and Comet chips.

Macronix Fast Ethernet Driver

This driver enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

Starting with this release, the mxfe(7D) driver is introduced. The mxfe(7D) supports 10/100 ethernet devices based on the Macronix 98715 controller.

x86: 4965 WiFi Driver

This driver enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

The new 4965 WiFi driver supports the Intel Centrino 4965 WiFi chip. The new driver is useful to laptop users with the 4965 chip in them.

x86: dmfe(7D)

This driver enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

Starting with this release, the dmfe(7D) driver for Davicom 10/100 Fast Ethernet devices has been updated to support x86 platforms.

x86: AMD–8111

This driver enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

The AMD-8111 HyperTransport I/O hub includes a 10/100 Mbps Ethernet LAN Controller and the driver is used by the Andretti platform.

x86: nv_sata SATA HBA Driver

This driver enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

nv_sata is a SATA HBA driver capable of hot-plug functions, for NVIDIA ck804/mcp55 and compatible SATA controllers.

For more information, see the nv_sata(7D) man page.

x86: SATA ATAPI Support in AHCI Driver

This driver enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

The AHCI driver supports SATA ATAPI CD/DVD devices. Users can use the SATA CD/DVD in AHCI mode instead of the compatible mode. The AHCI mode has better error handling and hot-plug capabilities.

For more information, see the ahci(7D) man page.

SATA NCQ Support in AHCI Driver

This driver enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

The AHCI driver supports the SATA NCQ feature. NCQ support improves performance of the driver.

For more information, see the ahci(7D) man page.

SPARC: rtls(7D)

This driver enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

Starting with this release, the rtls(7D) Ethernet is updated to support SPARC platforms. For more information, see the rtls(7D) man page.

32-bit: pgAdmin III

This freeware enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

pgAdmin III is a popular and feature rich Open Source administration and development platform for PostgreSQL. The graphical interface supports all PostgreSQL features and makes administration easy. This tool enables users to write simple SQL queries and also develop complex databases.

For more information, see http://www.pgadmin.org/.

GNU Libtool 1.5.22

This freeware enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

GNU Libtool is a script that enables package developers to provide generic shared library support. Libtool is used by developers who are working on software that has already adopted it. It is usually used in conjunction with the other GNU auto tools, Automake and Autoconf.

VIM 7.1

This freeware enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

Vi IMproved (VIM) is a popular clone of Visual Editor (vi). VIM is more full-featured than the SystemV vi editor in /usr/bin/vi.

For more information, see http://www.vim.org/.

p7zip

This freeware enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

Starting with this release, the Solaris OS includes p7zip port. p7zip is similar to the Windows compression and archiving utility, 7zip.

For more information, see http://p7zip.sourceforge.net/.

New Features in Solaris Express Developer Edition 9/07

Flash Player 9

This desktop tools enhancement is new in the Developer 9/07 release.

Stating with this release, the Solaris OS includes the Adobe Flash Player 9. For more information on this Flash Player, see http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/productinfo/features/.

x86: Streamlined Installer

This desktop tools enhancement is new in the Developer 9/07 release.

The Developer 9/07 release provides a streamlined installation experience for x86 laptop users. A new graphical user interface guides you through a user-friendly installation of the latest Solaris Express Developer Edition release, including the most current developer tools.

For more information about this feature and step-by-step procedures, see the Solaris Express Developer Edition Installation Guide: Laptop Installations.

Desktop Notification

This desktop tools enhancement is new in the Developer 9/07 release.

Starting with this release, desktop notification is supported on Solaris. With the desktop notification support, users are notified when specific asynchronous events occur, for example, when a removable disk is plugged into the system.

For more information, see http://www.galago-project.org/news/index.php.

GNOME Devhelp

This desktop tools enhancement is new in the Developer 9/07 release.

Devhelp is a useful applet for developers to browse and search GNOME API references. The applet works natively with gtk-doc and is used to browse product documentation.

For more information, see the devhelp man pages.

GNOME 2.18

This desktop tools enhancement is new in the Developer 9/07 release.

The GNOME 2.18 enhancement has the following features:

Automatic Detection and Configuration of Local USB Printers

This desktop tools enhancement is new in the Developer 9/07 release.

The Developer 9/07 release includes desktop support for the Automatic Printing Configuration in the OpenSolaris Presto Project. The desktop support includes a GNOME applet, and configuration and preferences applet, capplet. The applet enables notification and processing of specific printer events such as hot-plug or error events on the GNOME panel. The capplet enables controlling the applet behavior. In this release, the desktop support is in combination with the HAL USB printer support which enables automatically detecting and configuring local USB printer support.

For more information, see Support for Automatic Printer Discovery and Configuration in the GNOME Desktop Environment in System Administration Guide: Solaris Printing.

Pidgin 2.0

This desktop tools enhancement is new in the Developer 9/07 release.

Pigdin is a popular open source instant messaging client. Pigdin 2.0 includes the following features:

GNU Automake

This developer tools enhancement is new in the Developer 9/07 release.

Starting with this release, GNU Automake 1.9.6 and GNU Automake 1.10 have been integrated into the Solaris OS. GNU Automake is a tool which is used for generating makefiles and is commonly used by developers working on open-source projects.

For more information, see http://sourceware.org/automake/

Solaris ZFS File System Features

This section describes new ZFS features in the Solaris Express Developer Edition 9/07 release.

For more information about these ZFS file system enhancements, see the Solaris ZFS Administration Guide.

uid_t and gid_t Type Changes

This developer tools enhancement is new in the Developer 9/07 release.

Starting with this release, the uid_t and gid_t types have been changed from long (32-bit binaries) and int (64-bit binaries) types to the uint32_t type. This type is used for both 32-bit and 64-bit binaries. This change promotes compatibility with other operating systems.

As part of changing the type of uid_t and gid_t, the Solaris implementation also reserves the uid_t and gid_t values that range from 231 to 232 - 2. The value 232 - 1 continues to be reserved for use as a sentinel value. Values that are assigned in this new range are temporary assignments made by the new identity mapping service. Note that, these values do not persist over a system reboot. Therefore, applications should not write UID or GID values to persistent files in the file system. Nor should applications send these values across a network connection as a means of referring to a persistent identity. For persistence, use the corresponding identity name. Solaris utilities, such as the tar command, and the NFSv4 network protocol, already follow these best practices.

Because the new and old uid_t and gid_t types occupy the same amount of space, existing binaries are not affected. For example, binaries that are compiled with older definitions. In these instances, there is no need to recompile the code. Binaries, object files, as well as shared libraries including libraries that are linked against Solaris shared libraries, are also not affected.

The impact of these changes are as following:

Locale Creator

This language support enhancement is new in the Developer 9/07 release.

Locale Creator is a command line and Graphical User Interface tool which enables users to create and customize Solaris locales. This tool enables users to create installable Solaris packages containing customized locale data of a specific locale. Once the created package has been installed, the user has a fully working locale available on the system. For more information, see:

x86: MONITOR and MWAIT CPU Idle Loop

This kernel functions enhancement is new in the Developer 9/07 release.

The Solaris OS uses the SSE3 MONITOR and MWAIT instructions in x86 processor idle loop. Using the SSE3 instructions in the processor idle loop eliminates the overhead of sending and receiving an interrupt to wake up a halted processor. MONITOR is used to specify a memory range to “monitor”. MWAIT halts the processor until the address previously specified with MONITOR is accessed. With the new idle loop a processor only has to write to memory to wake up a halted processor.

IPsec and IKE Are Managed as SMF Services

This networking enhancement is new in the Developer 9/07 release.

Starting with this release, the service management facility (SMF) manages IPsec and IKE as a set of services:

By default, the policy and ipsecalgs services are enabled, and the manual-key and ike services are disabled. For traffic to be protected by IPsec, configure either manual keying or IKE, and populate the /etc/inet/ipsecinit.conf file. This enables the appropriate key management service before refreshing the policy service. For more information, see Chapter 19, IP Security Architecture (Overview), in System Administration Guide: IP Services.

The Network IPsec Management profile is added for managing IPsec in a role. Also, the ipsecconf and ipseckey commands can check the syntax of their respective configuration files. For more information, see the ipsecconf(1M) and ipseckey(1M) man pages.

CPU Caps

This system resources enhancement is new in the Developer 9/07 release.

CPU caps provide absolute fine-grained limits on the amount of CPU resources that can be consumed by a project or a zone. CPU caps are provided as a zonecfg resource, and as project and zone-wide resource controls.

For more information, see the following:

iSNS Support in the Solaris iSCSI Target

This device management enhancement is new in the Developer 9/07 release.

This Solaris release provides support for the Internet Storage Name Service (iSNS) protocol in the Solaris iSCSI target software. The iSNS protocol enables automated discovery, management, and configuration of iSCSI devices on a TCP/IP network.

Currently, the Solaris iSCSI software does not include native iSNS server support, but in this Solaris release, you can use the iscsitadm command to add access to an existing iSNS server to automatically discover the iSCSI devices in your network. The iSNS server can be specified by hostname or IP address. After you add the iSNS server information, you will need to enable access to the server.

For more information, see iscsitadm(1M) and Chapter 14, Configuring Solaris iSCSI Targets and Initiators (Tasks), in System Administration Guide: Devices and File Systems.

SPARC: Shared Contexts Support

This system performance enhancement is new in the Developer 9/07 release.

The context mechanism, which is used by the Memory Management Unit (MMU) hardware to distinguish between the use of the same virtual address in different process address spaces, introduces some inefficiencies when shared memory is used. The inefficiencies are because the data at a particular shared memory the address in different processes may really be identical, but the context number associated with each process is different. Therefore, the MMU hardware will not be able to recognize a match. This results in mappings being unnecessarily evicted from the MMU translation cache, Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB), to be replaced by identical mappings with a different context number.

The UltraSPARC T2 (Niagara 2) system has an additional “shared” context, which is a hardware feature which can be used to prevent the inefficiency in handling shared memory. When the TLB is searched for mapping a match on either the private or the shared context results in a TLB hit. The current software support for shared context activates the feature for processes which use Dynamic Intimate Shared Memory (DISM). In this case the process text segment and DISM segments mapped at the same virtual address and with the same permissions for each process will use the shared context.

x86: CPUID-based Cache Hierarchy Awareness

This system performance enhancement is new in the Developer 9/07 release.

Modern Intel processors provide an interface for discovering information about the processor's cache hierarchy through the CPUID instruction.

Flash Update Tool

This system administration enhancement is new in the Developer 9/07 release.

fwflash(1M) is a new Solaris command for the manipulation of firmware for PCI-X, and PCI-Express HBA and HCA cards. Currently the command enables listing, reading, and writing the firmware for the InfiniBand HCA cards.

For more information about this command, see the fwflash(1M) man page.

The audit_user(4) Database Is Not Access-restricted

This security enhancement is new in the Developer 9/07 release.

The audit_user(4) database is no longer an access-restricted database. Existing Network Information Service Plus (NIS+) name servers can be updated with the command:


# nischmod nw+r audit_user

Ensure the following conditions:

Creating a new NIS name server using the installed ypmake(1M) creates an unrestricted audit_user database. Similarly, creating a new NIS+ name server using nissetup(1M) also creates an unrestricted audit_user database.

For more information, see the following:

x86: Graphics Support for i945 and i965 Cards

This driver enhancement is new in the Developer 9/07 release.

Starting with this release, 2-D and accelerated 3-D graphics are supported for Intel integrated i945 and i965 series graphics cards. This support includes the kernel agpgart and Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) drivers, user level Xorg DDX drivers and corresponding Mesa 3–D drivers.

The graphics support feature enables high resolution and accelerated 3–D rendering on the i945 and i965 graphics cards.

rge Driver

This driver enhancement is new in the Developer 9/07 release.

Starting with this release, support is provided for the RTL8110SC/RTL8169SC chipset in the Realtek Gigabit Ethernet driver rge.

x86: bnx II Ethernet Driver

This driver enhancement is new in the Developer 9/07 release.

Starting with this release, support is provided for the Broadcom NetXtreme (bnx) II Ethernet chipset, which includes BRCM5706C, BRCM5706S, BRCM5708C, and BRCM5708S.

For more information, see the bnx(7D) man page.

x86: Ralink RT2500 802.11b/g Wireless Driver

This driver enhancement is new in the Developer 9/07 release.

Starting with this release, a new wireless driver ral is integrated into the Solaris OS. The new driver provides support for the Ralink RT2500 802.11b/g chipset. The driver increases the coverage of WiFi support in Solaris and enhances user experience on Solaris WiFi.

For more information, see http://opensolaris.org/os/community/laptop/.

x86: RealTek 8180L 802.11b Wireless Driver

This driver enhancement is new in the Developer 9/07 release.

Starting with this release, rtw(7D) is the driver for RealTek 8180L 802.11b PCMCIA wireless adapter. The driver increases the coverage of WiFi support in Solaris and enhances user-experience on Solaris WiFi.

For more information, see the following:

x86: 3945 WiFi Driver

This driver enhancement is new in the Developer 9/07 release.

The new 3945 WiFi driver supports the Intel Centrino 3945 WiFi chip. The new driver is useful to laptop users with the 3945 chip in them.

libchewing 0.3.0

This language support enhancement is new in the Developer 9/07 release.

Chewing input method (IM) is based on libchewing which is an open source library for Traditional Chinese input. libchewing has been upgraded to the libchewing 0.3.0 version. Some of the features of the new version include:

For further information, see the International Language Environments Guide.

C-URL Wrappers Library

This freeware enhancement is new in the Developer 9/07 release.

C-URL is a utility library that provides programmatic access to the most common Internet protocols such as HTTP, FTP, TFTP, SFTP, and TELNET. C-URL is also extensively used in various applications.

For more information, see http://curl.haxx.se/.

Libidn - Internationalized Domain Library

This freeware enhancement is new in the Developer 9/07 release.

Libidn provides implementations of the Stringprep (RFC 3454), Nameprep (RFC 3491), Punycode (RFC 3492) and IDNA (RFC 3490) specifications. This library provides new functionality and facilities to the Solaris OS.

For more information, see the following:

LibGD - The Graphics Draw Library

This freeware enhancement is new in the Developer 9/07 release.

LibGD is a graphics conversion and manipulation utility library. This library is used extensively in web-based application frameworks. The command line utilities of LibGD provide easy-to-use graphics conversion facilities.

For more information, see http://www.libgd.org/.

Perl-Compatible Regular Expressions

This freeware enhancement is new in the Developer 9/07 release.

PCREs enable programmatic access to Perl-Compatible Regular Expressions. Prior to PCRE, Perl regular expressions were only available through Perl.

For more information, see http://www.pcre.org/.

TIDY HTML Library

This freeware enhancement is new in the Developer 9/07 release.

TIDY is a HTML parser. It is the HTML equivalent of lint(1). TIDY is useful in validating the accuracy of static and dynamic HTML pages.

For more information, see http://tidy.sourceforge.net/.

New Features in Solaris Express Developer Edition 5/07

Quagga Software Routing Suite

This networking enhancement is new in the Developer 5/07 release.

Quagga Software Routing Suite delivers a set of IETF routing protocols for Solaris, including OSPF and BGP, allowing for high-availability deployment of Solaris through dynamic routing, manageable through SMF 'routeadm'.

Quagga is a community fork of the GNU Zebra software previously included in Solaris, providing many updates and some new features. For more information, see /etc/quagga/README.Solaris.

DHCPv6 Client

This networking enhancement is new in the Developer 5/07 release.

Starting with this release, the Solaris OS supports Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol for IPv6 (DHCPv6), as described in RFC 3315. DHCPv6 enables Solaris to acquire IPv6 addresses automatically from the local DHCP servers without manual configuration.

For more information, see the following man pages:

nwamd Network Auto-Configuration Daemon

This networking enhancement is new in the Developer 5/07 release.

The Developer 5/07 release booting process runs the nwamd daemon. This daemon implements an alternate instance of the SMF service, svc:/network/physical, which enables automated network configuration with minimal intervention.

The nwamd daemon monitors the Ethernet port and automatically enables DHCP on the appropriate IP interface. If no cable is plugged into a wired network, the nwamd daemon conducts a wireless scan and sends queries to the user for a WiFi access point to connect to.

Laptop users do not need to spend extensive amounts of time manually configuring the interfaces on their systems. Automatic configuration also aids system administrators, who can reconfigure network addresses with minimal intervention.

The OpenSolaris Network Auto-Magic Phase 0 page and nwamd man page contain further details, including instructions for turning off the nwamd daemon, if preferred. For more information and a link to the nwamd(1M) man page, see http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/nwam/phase0/.

Sendmail

This networking enhancement is new in the Developer 5/07 release.

There are some minor new options to sendmail(1M) and some new configuration macros described in /etc/mail/cf/README. The chief of these macros are the following three new FEATURE() macros, all of which are helpful in blocking unwanted spam:

For information about sendmail, see the sendmail(1M) man page.

x86: Wireless WPA Supplicant

This networking enhancement is new in the Developer 5/07 release.

The Solaris WiFi driver has been enhanced to support WiFi Protected Access (WPA) personal mode. Starting with this release, a new service, network/wpa, is introduced. The nwam(1M), dladm(1M), net80211(5), and ath(7D) drivers are enhanced to support the WPA personal mode. Users can access the WPA wireless network by using dladm or nwam:


$ dladm create-secobj -c wpa mykey  /* create a wpa psk specified by your AP */
 

$ dladm connect-wifi -e essid -k mykey

x86: nge Driver Updated to Support Jumbo Framework

This networking enhancement is new in the Developer 5/07 release.

Starting with this release, the nge driver has been updated to enable Jumbo Frame support. The nge driver's default MTU has been raised to 9 Kbytes, that improves system performance and lowers CPU utilization significantly.

For more information, see the nge(7D) man page.

Sockets Direct Protocol

This networking enhancement is new in the Developer 5/07 release.

The Sockets Direct Protocol (SDP) is a transport protocol layered over the Infiniband Transport Framework (IBTF). SDP is a standard implementation based on Annex 4 of the Infiniband Architecture Specification Vol1. SDP provides reliable byte-stream, flow controlled, two-way data transmission which is very similar to TCP.

For more information, see the sdp(7D) man page.

PPD File Management Utility

This system administration enhancement is new in the Developer 5/07 release.

The PostScript Printer Description (PPD) file management utility, /usr/sbin/ppdmgr, manages PPD files that are used with the Solaris print subsystem.

By using the ppdmgr utility, you can perform the following tasks:

You can add a new PPD file by using the ppdmgr utility or by using the lpadmin -n command. When you add a new PPD file, you automatically update the cache of the PPD file information that the printmgr GUI uses to display supported printer information.

Note –

The delivery location of PPD files in the Solaris OS has changed. During a software upgrade, any print servers with print queues that were defined by using PPD files from the previous PPD file delivery location, are automatically updated to reflect the new PPD file delivery location.

In addition, a new SMF service, print/ppd-cache-update, has been introduced. This service runs one time during system reboot to update the printer cache information with changes from all the PPD file repositories on the system. The service might take longer to transition to an online state during a system reboot after a software installation or upgrade. Also, if any changes were made to the PPD file repositories since the last PPD cache update, during system reboot, the service might take longer to come online. Changes made to the PPD file repositories on a system are not reflected in the PPD cache used by Solaris Print Manager until the print/ppd-cache-update service is online. The print/ppd-cache-update service is enabled by default.

For more information, see the following:

raidctl

This system administration enhancement is new in the Developer 5/07 release.

raidctl is a utility that can perform RAID configuration work by using multiple RAID controllers. The raidctl feature contains more detailed information about RAID components, including controller, volume and physical disks. The raidctl utility enables the user to track the RAID system more closely and simplify the learning effort on diverse RAID controllers.

For more information, see:

x86: stmsboot Porting

This system administration enhancement is new in the Developer 5/07 release.

Starting with this release, the stmsboot utility is ported to x86 systems. stmsboot is a utility that is used to enable or disable MPxIO for fibre-channel devices. This stmsboot utility already exists on SPARC systems.

Users can use this utility to enable or disable MPxIO automatically. Previously, users had to enable or disable MPxIO manually, which was difficult, especially for a SAN system boot.

For more information, see the following:

MPxIO Path Steering

This system administration enhancement is new in the Developer 5/07 release.

The MPxIO path steering feature includes a mechanism for issuing SCSI commands to an MPxIO LU to be delivered down a specified path to the LU. In order to provide this functionality, a new IOCTL command, MP_SEND_SCSI_CMD, is added and is referenced through the existing scsi_vhci IOCTL interface. An extension is introduced to the multipath management library (MP-API) which provides access to this new IOCTL command. This allows network administrators to run diagnostic commands through a specified path.

x86: GRUB Extended Support for Directly Loading and Booting the unix Kernel

This system administration enhancement is new in the Developer 5/07 release.

Starting with this release, changes have been made to GRUB that enable the boot loader to directly load and boot the unix kernel. The GRUB multiboot module is no longer used. This implementation integrates the previous multiboot functionality directly into the platform-specific unix kernel module. These changes reduce the time, as well as memory requirements, that are needed to boot the Solaris OS.

Other additions and modifications to GRUB based booting include:

SunVTS 7.0

This system administration enhancement is new in the Developer 5/07 release.

SunVTSTM is a comprehensive system validation and test suite designed to support Sun hardware platforms and peripherals. SunVTS 7.0 is the next generation of SunVTS 6.0 and its compatible versions.

SunVTS 7.0 includes the following features:

SunVTS 7.0 follows a conventional three-tier architecture model. This model is composed of a browser-based user interface, a Java based middle server, and a diagnostic agent.

DTrace Enabled Control Block dcmd

This system administration enhancement is new in the Developer 5/07 release.

Starting with this release, the ::dtrace_ecb dcmd to the modular debugger, mdb, enables a user to iterate over the Enabled Control Blocks (ECBs) for a given DTrace user. This feature enables easy access to the data structures related to a user's currently enabled probes.

Brand-Specific Handlers for zoneadm Commands

This system administration enhancement is new in the Developer 5/07 release.

The zoneadm(1M) command is modified to call an external program that performs validation checks against a specific zoneadm operation on a branded zone. The checks are performed before the specified zoneadm subcommand is executed. However, the external brand-specific handler program for zoneadm(1M) should be specified by the brand's configuration file, /usr/lib/brand/<brand_name>/config.xml. The external program is specified by the brand's configuration file by using the <verify_adm> tag.

To introduce a new type of branded zone, and list brand-specific handlers for the zoneadm(1M) subcommand, add the following line to the brand's config.xml file:


<verify_adm><absolute path to external program> %z %* %*</verify_adm>

In this line, %z is the zone name, the first %*is the zoneadm subcommand, and the second %* is the subcommand's arguments.

This feature is useful when a given branded zone might not support all the zoneadm(1M) operations possible. Brand-specific handlers provide a way to gracefully fail unsupported zoneadm commands.

Ensure that the handler program that you specify recognizes all zoneadm(1M) subcommands.

x86: SATA AHCI HBA Driver

This system administration enhancement is new in the Developer 5/07 release.

The AHCI driver is a SATA framework-compliant HBA driver that supports various SATA HBA controllers that are compatible with the AHCI specification defined by Intel. Currently, the AHCI driver supports INTEL ICH6 and VIA vt8251 controllers, and hot-plugging functions.

For more information, see the ahci(7D) man page.

x86: Firmware Download Capability for SATA Drives

This system administration enhancement is new in the Developer 5/07 release.

This feature provides firmware download capability for SATA drives under the SATA framework. System administrators can use the USCSI interface to update firmware on SATA disks.

x86: SCSI LOG SENSE Support Under SATA Module

This system administration enhancement is new in the Developer 5/07 release.

The SCSI LOG SENSE support feature provides the capability of obtaining the following information:

SCSI LOG SENSE PAGES 0

The available pages

0x10

Self test results

0x2f

Information Exception log

0x30

SMART READ DATA

x86: Informational Exception Control Page

This system administration enhancement is new in the Developer 5/07 release.

The SATA framework now supports the Informational Exception Control page. The Informational Exception Control page enables and disables Informational Exception reporting, which is necessary for device-health monitoring.

IP Instances: LAN and VLAN Separation for Non-Global Zones

This system resources enhancement is new in the Developer 5/07 release.

IP networking can now be configured in two different ways, depending on whether the zone is assigned an exclusive IP instance or shares the IP layer configuration and state with the global zone. IP types are configured by using the zonecfg command.

The shared-IP type is the default. These zones connect to the same VLANs or same LANs as the global zone and share the IP layer. lx branded zones are configured as Shared-IP zones. For more information, see x86: lx Branded Zones: Solaris Containers for Linux Applications.

Full IP-level functionality is available in an exclusive-IP zone. If a zone must be isolated at the IP layer on the network, then the zone can have an exclusive IP. The exclusive-IP zone can be used to consolidate applications that must communicate on different subnets that are on different VLANs or different LANs.

For more information, see the following:

Improved zonecfg Procedures for Creating Containers

This system resources enhancement is new in the Developer 5/07 release.

More integrated resource management and zones features now make it easier to leverage the resource-management capabilities of the system through the zonecfg command. The resource configuration you specify is automatically created for you when the zone boots. You no longer have to perform any manual steps related to setting up resource management.

For more information, see the following:

New projmod(1M) Option

This system resources enhancement is new in the Developer 5/07 release.

Use the projmod command with the -A option to apply the resource control values found in the project database to the active project. Existing values that do not match the values defined in the project file, such as values set manually by prctl(1), are removed.

Solaris ZFS File System Enhancements

This section describes new ZFS features in the Solaris Express Developer Edition 5/07 release.

For more information about these enhancements, see the Solaris ZFS Administration Guide.

Thunderbird 2.0

Thunderbird 2.0 is a full-featured email, RSS, and newsgroup client developed by the Mozilla community. It provides functionality equivalent to the Mozilla mail and newsgroups features.

Firefox 2.0.0.3 Web Browser

This desktop tools enhancement is new in the Developer 5/07 release.

Firefox 2.0.0.3 focuses on user interface innovations that help users in their common browsing tasks while interacting with search, bookmarks and history. Firefox 2.0.0.3 has improvements to tabbed browsing, RSS handling, managing extensions, security and performance.

gDesklets

This desktop tools enhancement is new in the Developer 5/07 release.

gDesklets provide an advanced architecture for desktop applets. The applets placed on the desktop are meant to help the user quickly retrieve information without hindering normal activity.

For more information, see:

Lightning

This desktop tools enhancement is new in the Developer 5/07 release.

The Lightning 0.3 feature includes the following new features:

Battery Charge Monitor

This desktop tools enhancement is new in the Developer 5/07 release.

The battery charge monitor is an applet for the GNOME panel. If the battery is available on a machine, the battery charge monitor displays the status of the battery, including the remaining charge and time. If the battery is not available, the monitor shows an AC adapter icon in the system tray.

The battery charge monitor also notifies users when the battery is fully charged or is about to lose charge. The applet for the battery charge monitor ensures that customers are notified before their laptops lose power. Thus, serious loss of data can be prevented.

Subversion Source Code Management System

This developer tools enhancement is new in the Developer 5/07 release.

Starting with this release, the Subversion source code management system is included in Solaris. Subversion is a popular source code management system which is used by many open-source projects. This system is also being used in OpenSolaris development.

The Subversion feature provides Solaris users the needed tool to participate in the development of open-source projects. For more information about Subversion, see http://subversion.tigris.org/.

GNU-diffutils

This developer tools enhancement is new in the Developer 5/07 release.

The Developer 5/07 release includes GNU utilities for comparing and merging files. For more information, see http://gnu.org/software/diffutils.

PostgreSQL 8.2

This database software enhancement is new in the Developer 5/07 release.

This feature is the latest version of the PostgreSQL Open Source relational database system. PostgreSQL 8.2 for Solaris now includes Kerberos 5 support and embedded DTrace probes.

For a comprehensive list of features and enhancements in this release, see http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/release-8-2.html. For more information about PostgreSQL , see http://www.postgresql.org.

64-bit SPARC: CPU Power Management

This device management enhancement is new in the Developer 5/07 release.

This feature introduces two new power.conf keywords to permit CPU devices to be power managed independently of automatic power management. These are the new power.conf keywords:

Enhanced st SCSI Reservations

This device management enhancement is new in the Developer 5/07 release.

Starting with this release, there is a new reservation mechanism in the st driver. The new mechanism enables the st driver to reserve the tape drive only when a command that requires reservations is sent. The reservation mechanism also enables the st driver to process inquiry commands issued from other hosts while the drive is reserved by a different host.

Some of Independent Software Vendor's (ISV's) backup software and media management tools benefit from the enhanced st SCSI reservations feature. Because of this new feature, management tools could inquire and browse tape libraries when the backup tool is reading or writing tapes.

dtlogin Language Selection Overhaul

This X11 windowing enhancement is new in the Developer 5/07 release.

CDE currently lists the cryptic locale names in the form of a cascade menu in the login screen. The dtlogin language selection overhaul feature delivers a more user-friendly language-oriented login list. CDE has a feature to remember the per display default login language name. For SunRay environments, you can use an X resource to disable displays from remembering the login language.

For more information, see the dtlogin man page.

Xorg X11R7.2 Server and Drivers

This X11 windowing enhancement is new in the Developer 5/07 release.

The Xorg server for the X11 window system, the associated graphics, and the input device drivers, have been upgraded to the X11R7.2 release. The X11R7.2 release includes the Xorg server version 1.2. This release also adds 64-bit versions of the Xorg server for both x64 and SPARC platforms, though drivers for common SPARC graphics devices are not yet available for Xorg.

This release also includes the Xephyr nested X server and the Xorg version of Xvfb, both of which are installed in the /usr/X11/bin directory. This version of Xorg no longer supports the Low Bandwidth X (LBX) extension. The use of the X tunneling and compression features of ssh(1) is suggested for sites that need X displays across extremely bandwidth-limited network links.

Japanese Font Update

This language support enhancement is new in the Developer 5/07 release.

Starting with this release, the Japanese HG font has been updated to be compliant with JISX0213:2004.

More Japanese iconv Modules for Unicode

This language support enhancement is new in the Developer 5/07 release.

Starting with this release, the following two types of codeset conversions between the Unicode and Japanese codesets have been added:

For more information, see the iconv_ja(5) man page.

Input Method Switcher Enhancement and EMEA Keyboard Layout Emulation Support

This language support enhancement is new in the Developer 5/07 release.

The input method switcher application, gnome-im-switcher-applet, is replaced with a stand-alone GTK+ application, iiim-panel. iiim-panel now starts and resides on the GNOME panel automatically when you log in to the Java DS in UTF-8 or Asian locales. iiim-panel can also run in the Common Desktop Environment (CDE).

IIIMF supports language engines that emulate the EMEA keyboard layout such as French, Polish or Dutch.

For more information, see the online help of the input method preference editor (iiim-properties).

x86: Concurrent FPDMA READ/WRITE QUEUED Under SATA Module

This device driver enhancement is new in the Developer 5/07 release.

Starting with this release, concurrent READ/WRITE FPDMA QUEUED commands are supported. There is considerable performance enhancement when performing I/O operations using the Solaris marvell88sx driver under specific workload conditions. Other workloads benefit to a smaller degree. There is also significant performance enhancement under many workloads for drives that support this optional portion of the SATA specification.

ACM Driver of USB Communication Device Class

This driver enhancement is new in the Developer 5/07 release.

Starting with this release, the usbsacm driver supports USB modems that conform to the specification for the Universal Serial Bus Communication Device Class Abstract Control Model (USB CDC ACM). You can attach the usbsacm driver with your mobile phone, PCMCIA cards, or any modem-like devices. The usbsacm driver generates term nodes under /dev/term/. You can then use pppd(1M) to transmit datagrams over these serial ports.

Enhanced USB EHCI Host Controller Driver

This driver enhancement is new in the Developer 5/07 release.

Enhanced USB EHCI host controller driver provides isochronous transfer support for USB 2.0 or high speed isochronous devices.

For more information, see the usb_isoc_request(9S) man page.

USCSI LUN Reset Support

This driver enhancement is new in the Developer 5/07 release.

This feature is to supply the logical unit number (LUN) reset support by uscsi commands. Users can use LUN reset commands with uscsi_flags set as USCSI_RESET_LUN with this feature.

x86: Solaris Audio Driver for ATI IXP400

This driver enhancement is new in the Developer 5/07 release.

The audioixp driver is the Solaris audio driver for the ATI IXP400 Southbridge chipset from ATI Corporation. The ATI IXP400 chipset includes an embedded AC97 audio controller. This chipset is widely adopted by many motherboard vendors, for example, the new Ferrari4000 model. The audioixp driver follows the Solaris Audio Driver Architecture (SADA) framework.

pcwl and pcan Drivers

These driver enhancements are new in the Developer 5/07 release.

The pcwl driver is used for Wavelan and Prism II 802.11b devices. The pcan driver is for Aironet 802.11b devices. These two drivers have been used by internal users through frkit.

ipw and iwi Drivers

These driver enhancements are new in the Developer 5/07 release.

Starting with this release, two wireless drivers are provided: the ipw or the Intel Pro Wireless 2100b driver and the iwi or the Intel Pro Wireless 2200bg/2915abg driver. These drivers increase the coverage of WiFi support in Solaris and improve the user's WiFi experience. For more information on WiFi drivers, see the Laptop community at http://opensolaris.org/os/community/laptop/.

USB Video Class Driver

This driver enhancement is new in the Developer 5/07 release.

The USB video class driver, usbvc, supports web cameras that are compliant with the USB video class specifications at http://www.usb.org/home. The usbvc driver supports the following web cameras: :

The usbvc driver, enables a few video applications, for example, the video conference application, Ekiga.

For more information, see the usbvc(7D) man page.

MPxIO Extension for Serial Attached SCSI Devices on mpt(7D)

This driver enhancement is new in the Developer 5/07 release.

The mpt driver has been enhanced to support MPxIO with supported storage devices. When MPxIO is enabled for Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and SATA devices, they are enumerated under scsi_vhci(7D) just like fibre channel devices under fp(7D).

Starting with this release, stmsboot(1M) has also been enhanced to support multipathed SAS devices. stmsboot(1D) operates on all attached and multipath-capable controllers by default.

If you wish to only enable multipathing on fp or mpt controllers then you can use the new flag which has been added to restrict operations. The command, /usr/sbin/stmsboot -D mpt -e, will enable MPxIO only on attached mpt controllers. Replacing mpt with fp in this command will make stmsboot enable MPxIO only on attached fp controllers.

HP LTO-4 Tape Drive Support

This driver enhancement is new in the Developer 5/07 release.

Starting with this release, the Solaris OS supports the HP LTO-4 tape drive.

IBM LTO-4 Tape Drive Support

This driver enhancement is new in the Developer 5/07 release.

Starting with this release, the Solaris OS supports the IBM LTO-4 tape drive.

x86: Support for Lucent/Agere Venus Internal PCI Modems

This driver enhancement is new in the Developer 5/07 release.

The Solaris serial port driver is enhanced to support internal PCI modems based on the Lucent/Agere Venus chipset. These 56–Kbyte modems appear as ordinary serial ports in Solaris.

For more information, see the asy(7D) man page.

SPARC: ntwdt Driver for UltraSPARC-T1 (Niagara) Systems

This driver enhancement is new in the Developer 5/07 release.

Starting with release, there is a user-programmable watchdog timer on sun4v platforms that supports backward compatibility. The user can manipulate the Application Watchdog Timer through IOCTLs provided by the backward compatible ntwdt pseudo driver.

Adaptec Ultra320 SCSI Controllers

This driver enhancement is new in the Developer 5/07 release.

Starting with this release, the Ultra320 SCSI HBA with PCI Express interface from Adaptec can run in native MSI interrupt mode and not in legacy fix mode.

New Features in Solaris Express Developer Edition 2/07

IPsec Tunnel Reform

This networking enhancement is new in the Developer 2/07 release.

Solaris now implements IPsec Tunnel Mode per RFC 2401. Inner-packet selectors can be specified on a per-tunnel-interface basis using the new “ tunnel” keyword of ipsecconf(1M). IKE and PF_KEY handle Tunnel Mode identities for Phase 2/Quick Mode. Interoperability with other IPsec implementations is greatly increased.

For more information, see Transport and Tunnel Modes in IPsec in System Administration Guide: IP Services.

Large Send Offload

This networking enhancement is new in the Developer 2/07 release.

Large Send Offload (LSO) is a hardware off-loading technology. LSO off-loads TCP Segmentation to NIC hardware to improve the network performance by reducing the workload on the CPUs. LSO is helpful for 10Gb network adoption on systems with slow CPU threads or lack of CPU resource. This feature integrates basic LSO framework in Solaris TCP/IP stack, so that any LSO-capable NIC might be enabled with LSO capability.

GNOME System Tools

This desktop tools enhancement is new in the Developer 2/07 release.

Starting with this release, the Java DS includes the GNOME System Tools. This feature provides several system administration tools that enable the desktop users to perform basic administration of the following system's features:

The GNOME System Tools can be accessed under Launch->Administration menu.

GNOME 2.16

This desktop tools enhancement is new in the Developer 2/07 release.

Starting with this, the Java DS includes the new Gnome 2.16 desktop. The GNOME 2.16 desktop introduces new features and enhances the usability and performance of many commonly used applications. The desktop includes these new features:

Orca

This desktop tools enhancement is new in the Developer 2/07 release.

Orca is a free, open-source, flexible, and extensible screen reader that provides access to the graphical desktop. Access is through user-customizable combinations of speech, braille, or magnification.

Orca works with applications and toolkits that support the Assistive Technology Service Provider Interface (AT-SPI), which is the primary assistive technology infrastructure for Solaris and Linux operating systems. Applications and toolkits that support the AT-SPI include the GNOME GTK+ toolkit, the Java platform's Swing toolkit, OpenOffice, and Mozilla.

StarOffice 8

This desktop tools enhancement is new in the Developer 2/07 release.

StarOffice 8 includes the following new features and enhancements:

For more information, see http://www.sun.com/software/star/staroffice/whats_new.jsp.

Ekiga

This desktop tools enhancement is new in the Developer 2/07 release.

Ekiga is a videoconferencing and VOIP/IP-Telephony application that enables you to make audio and video calls to remote users with H.323 or SIP hardware or software (such as Microsoft Netmeeting). It supports PC-to-PC and PC-to-Phone calls.

Ekiga also supports the following features:

Vino

This desktop tools enhancement is new in the Developer 2/07 release.

Remote Desktop (vino) provides a VNC server that integrates with GNOME, supporting multiple clients to access a GNOME desktop session remotely. It enables you to export your running desktop to another computer for remote use or diagnosis.

For more information, see the vino-preferences and vino-server man pages.

Solaris Live Upgrade

This installation enhancement is new in the Developer 2/07 release.

Starting with this release, Solaris Live Upgrade has been changed with the following enhancements:

For more information about upgrading when non-global zones are installed on a system, see Solaris Express Installation Guide: Solaris Live Upgrade and Upgrade Planning.

x86: Keyboard Configuration Automated

Starting with this release, the sysidkbd tool configures your USB language and its corresponding keyboard layout on x86 systems.

With the new sysidkbd tool, the following procedure occurs:

Previously, the USB keyboard assumed a self-identifying value of one during the installation. Therefore, all of the keyboards that were not self-identifying always configured for a U.S. English keyboard layout during installation on SPARC.

Note –

PS/2 keyboards are not self-identifying. You will have to select the keyboard layout during the installation.

JumpStart Specifications: If the keyboard is not self-identifying and you want to prevent being prompted during your JumpStart installation, select the keyboard language in your sysidcfg file. For JumpStart installation, the default is for a U.S. English keyboard layout. To select another language and its corresponding keyboard layout, set the keyboard keyword in your sysidcfg file .

For more information, see the Solaris Express Installation Guide: Network-Based Installations.

This feature was introduced for SPARC systems in the Solaris Express 10/06 release. See SPARC: New sysidkbd Tool Configures Your Keyboard.

Upgrading the Solaris OS When Non-Global Zones Are Installed

This installation enhancement is new in the Developer 2/07 release.

Starting with this release, you can upgrade the Solaris OS when non-global zones are installed.

Note –

The only limitation to upgrading involves a Solaris Flash archive. When you use a Solaris Flash archive to install, an archive that contains non-global zones is not properly installed on your system.

The following changes accommodate systems that have non-global zones installed:

For step-by-step procedures for upgrading a system with non-global zones installed or for information about the Solaris Zones partitioning technology, see the following references:

Description 

For More Information 

Upgrading with Solaris Live Upgrade on a system with non-global zones 

Chapter 9, Upgrading the Solaris OS on a System With Non-Global Zones Installed, in Solaris Express Installation Guide: Solaris Live Upgrade and Upgrade Planning

Creating and using non-global zones 

System Administration Guide: Virtualization Using the Solaris Operating System

Upgrading with JumpStart 

Solaris Express Installation Guide: Custom JumpStart and Advanced Installations

Upgrading with the Solaris installation interactive GUI 

Solaris Express Installation Guide: Basic Installations

Solaris Key Management Framework

This security enhancement is new in the Developer 2/07 release.

The pktool command enables the administrator to manage PKI objects in all three keystores from a single utility.

The API layer enables the developer to specify the type of keystore to be used. KMF also provides plug-in modules for these PKI technologies. These plug-in modules enable developers to write new applications to use any of the supported keystores.

KMF has a unique feature that provides a system-wide policy database that KMF applications can use regardless of the type of keystore. By using the kmfcfg command, the administrator can create policy definitions in a global database. KMF applications can then choose a policy to enforce, so that all subsequent KMF operations are constrained by the policy being enforced. Policy definitions include rules for the following:

For more information, see the following:

rsync

This system administration enhancement is new in the Developer 2/07 release.

rsync is an open source utility that provides fast and incremental file transfer. This utility is used by system administrators to move, copy, synchronize data both local, and over the network. The rsync utility uses SSH as a secure transport between machines. rsync can also be used as a safe remote data backup tool for both full and incremental directory comparisons and transfers.

For more information, see http://rsync.samba.org/.

sharemgr(1M) and sharectl(1M) Utilities

This system administration tools enhancement is new in the Developer 2/07 release.

Starting with this release, you can use two new utilities to manage file systems and file-sharing protocols:

For more information, see the following:

Name Service Switch Enhancements

This system administration tools enhancement is new in the Developer 2/07 release.

Enhancements have been made to the name service switch (nss) and to the Name Switch Cache Daemon (nscd(1M)) in order to deliver new functionality. These enhancements include the following:

SMF Enhancements to Routing Management

This system administration tools enhancement is new in the Developer 2/07 release.

Starting with this release, routeadm (1M) is enhanced to manage SMF-based routing daemon services. Also, service conversions for the following commands are provided:

As a result, these services can be managed through standard SMF commands such as svcadm and svccfg, and utilize the restart capabilities that SMF provides.

X Server DTrace Provider

Starting with the Developer 2/07 release, the X Window System servers include a User-land Statically Defined Tracing (USDT) DTrace provider for instrumenting X11 client connections. The X Window System servers include the following:

For more information about available probes and their arguments, and sample dtrace scripts using them, see http://people.freedesktop.org/.

Direct Rendering Infrastructure

Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI) is an open sourced software framework for coordinating the following:

DRI enables direct access to graphics hardware in the X Window System in a safe and efficient manner. DRI also enables OpenGL hardware-accelerated, 3D rendering on UNIX-like operating systems. DRI framework and the accelerated driver for Intel have been ported to Solaris. Currently, DRI has the graphics chipsets produced by Intel, ATI, Via, and 3dfx.

SATA HBA Framework and Marvell Driver

This device management enhancement is new in the Developer 2/07 release.

Starting with this release the READ/WRITE FPDMA QUEUED commands are supported. There is considerable performance enhancement when performing I/O operations using the Marvell driver with Sun branded Hitachi model HDS7225SBSUN250G.

x86: NVIDIA Accelerated Graphics Drivers

This driver enhancement is new in the Developer 2/07 release.

Starting with this release, the accelerated graphics drivers for Xorg and OpenGL for NVIDIA Quadro and GeForce cards are included. The nvidia-settings and nvidia-xconfig configuration tools for these drivers are also provided.

Adaptec aac Hardware Support

This driver enhancement is new in the Developer 2/07 release.

The updated aac driver supports the new generation, rocket chip-based Adaptec Hardware RAID adapter. The aac driver also supports the Adaptec Storage Management Utility (ASM), which configures and monitors the controller and attached hard drives. For more information, see the Adaptec web-site http://www.adaptec.com/en-US/products/adps/.

x86: Direct Rendering Infrastructure Porting

This driver enhancement is new in the Developer 2/07 release.

In this release, the Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI) kernel-level framework and a kernel (Direct Rendering Manager) driver for Intel integrated chipsets have been ported from BSD to Solaris.

For more information about DRI, see Direct Rendering Infrastructure.

New Features in Solaris Express 12/06

This section describes all features that are new or have been enhanced in the Solaris Express 12/06 release.

Session Initiation Protocol Library (libsip)

This networking enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 12/06 release.

Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is an application layer protocol that can be used to initiate, modify, and terminate multimedia sessions such as Voice-over-IP (VoIP) and Instant Messaging (IM).

SIP library in Solaris provides a SIP stack, that conforms to RFC 3261, and a set of API to write SIP applications. Primary users of this library include developers who write SIP applications such as soft phones, proxy servers, redirect servers, etc.

The library supports all SIP headers in RFCs 3261, 3262, 3265, 3323, and 3325.

For more information about SIP, see the sip(7P) man page.

ZFS Command History (zpool history)

This system administration tools enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 12/06 release.

ZFS automatically logs successful zfs and zpool commands that modify pool state information. For example:


# zpool history
History for 'newpool':
2006-10-23.08:58:22 zpool create -f newpool c1t2d0
2006-10-23.08:59:02 zpool replace -f newpool c1t2d0 c1t3d0
2006-10-23.08:59:54 zpool attach -f newpool c1t3d0 c1t4d0

This feature enables you or Sun support personnel to identify the exact set of ZFS commands that was executed to troubleshoot an error scenario.

The features of the history log are as follows:

Currently, the zpool history command does not record user-ID, hostname, or zone-name.

For more information about troubleshooting ZFS problems, see Solaris ZFS Administration Guide.

Changes and Improvements to Removable Media Management

This device management enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 12/06 release.

Starting with this release, better services and methods that provide removable media management have replaced previous features for managing removable media.

The following new features are available:

The following features are removed:

Backward Compatibility

The following features provide backward compatibility with previous Solaris removable media features:

Mounting and Unmounting Removable Media

Most commands that begin with vol* are removed in this release. A modified version of rmmount and a new rmumount command are available to mount and unmount removable media.

These commands can be used to mount by device name, label, or mount point. For example, to mount an iPod:


% rmmount ipod

For example, to unmount the file systems on a DVD:


# rmumount cdrom
cdrom /dev/dsk/c0t6d0s5 unmounted
cdrom /dev/dsk/c0t6d0s0 unmounted

For more information, see the rmmount(1M) man page.

Mounting and Unmounting Diskettes

You can use the existing volcheck command to manually poll diskettes and mount them if a new diskette is detected.

If you manually reformat diskette after it is connected to the system, HAL is not automatically notified. Continue to use the volcheck command to notify the system and attempt to automount a new file system on a diskette.

Ejecting Removable Media

As in previous Solaris releases, use the eject command to unmount and eject removable media. However, the following eject options are available:

-f

Forces the device to eject even if the device is busy.

-l

Displays paths and nicknames of devices that can be ejected.

-t

A CD-ROM tray close command is provided to the device. Not all devices support this option.

For example, to eject by its volume label:


% eject mypictures

As in previous Solaris releases, you might need to issue the volcheck command before using the eject command to eject a diskette.

For more information, see the eject(1) man page.

Customizing Removable Media Management

For most customizations that were available in the vold.conf and rmmount.conf files, you will need to either use Desktop Volume manager preferences or modify the .fdi files.

Disabling Removable Media Features

You can disable some or all removable media features in this release:

SPARC: Process Count Scalability

This system resources enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 12/06 release.

The process count scalability feature improves the process count scalability of the Solaris OS. Currently, all UltraSPARC systems support a maximum of 8192 contexts. When the number of processes exceeds 8192, then the kernel steals contexts to keep the processes running. Stealing a context from a process involves the following tasks:

This procedure is very expensive and gets worse as the number of processes rise beyond 8K. The process count scalability feature completely redesigns context management. The contexts are managed on a per-MMU basis rather than a global basis which enables efficient TLB flushing and greatly improves the scalability of context management.

The process count scalability feature also improves throughput on workloads that consist of more than 8K active processes, or create and destroy processes at a high rate, and is most beneficial on systems with many CPUs.

Packet Filter Hooks

This networking enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 12/06 release.

The packet filter hooks feature includes the following significant functionalities:

The packet filter hooks feature is part of a new API that is internal to the kernel. Developers can use the API to work with IP inside the kernel or to intercept packets.

x86: Fault Management For Next Generation AMD Opteron Processors

The fault management feature introduces error-handling and fault-management support for CPUs and memory in systems that use AMD (TM) Opteron and Athlon 64 Rev F processors. These processors are used in the “M2” products from Sun such as the Sun Fire X2200 M2 and Ultra 20 M2. Previous Solaris releases provided fault management support for Opteron and Athlon 64 revisions B through E.

Fault management support is enabled by default. The fault management service detects correctable CPU and memory errors, the resulting telemetry is analyzed by diagnosis engines, and errors and faults are corrected whenever possible. When errors cannot be corrected by the system, the extended telemetry provides greater assistance to the system administrator.

For more information see http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/fm/.

Name service switch enhancements

This release contains upward compatible changes to the name service switch (nss) and to the Name Switch Cache Daemon - nscd(1M)- in order to deliver new functionality including the following:

New Features in Solaris Express 11/06

This section describes all features that are new or have been enhanced in the Solaris Express 11/06 release.

Resource Controls to Limit Locked Physical Memory

This system resource enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 11/06 release.

To limit the amount of locked physical memory available to a zone on a Solaris OS with zones installed, use the zone.max-locked-memory zone-wide resource control. The resource control is set through the add rctl resource property in zonecfg for non-global zones. With the introduction of zone.max-locked-memory, the proc_lock_memory privilege is now part of the standard default set of zone privileges.

The allocation of the locked physical memory resource across projects within the zone can be controlled by using the project.max-locked-memory resource control.

The project.max-locked-memory resource control replaces the project.max-device-locked-memory resource control, which has been removed from the Solaris OS.

For more information, see the following:

x86: lx Branded Zones: Solaris Containers for Linux Applications

This system resource enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 11/06 release.

Sun's BrandZ technology provides the framework to create non-global branded zones that contain nonnative operating environments. As a simple extension of non-global zones, branded zones offer the same isolated and secure environment, and all brand management is performed through extensions to the current zones structure.

The brand currently available is the lx brand, Solaris Containers for Linux Applications. These non-global zones provide a Linux application environment on an x86 or x64 machine running the Solaris OS.

The lx brand includes the tools necessary to install a CentOS 3.5 to 3.8 or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.5 to 3.8 inside a non-global zone. Machines running the Solaris OS in either 32-bit or 64-bit mode can execute 32-bit Linux applications.

For more information, see Part III, Branded Zones in the System Administration Guide: Virtualization Using the Solaris Operating System.

Also see the following man pages:

Name Service Switch and nscd Enhancements

This system resource enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 11/06 release.

Starting with this release, the name service switch is updated. The name service switch includes nscd and all getXbyY interfaces that query files and network data from DNS, NIS, NIS+, or LDAP. The behavior of the name service switch enhancements is identical to previous Solaris Express releases.

The major functional change in the Solaris Express 11/06 release is that, when the you enable nscd, nscd performs all name service lookups. Prior to this release, nscd cached only a small subset of lookups. To enable nscd, type the following command:


# svcadm enable name-service-cache
Note –

nscd is normally enabled by default.

If incorrect name service behavior such as incorrect getXbyY results or nscd hangs, is detected while nscd is running, either restarting or disabling nscd should correct the behavior. To restart nscd type the following command:


# svcadm restart name-service-cache

Disabling nscd automatically forces applications to perform all their own name service lookups as in prior releases of Solaris Express. To disable nscd, type the following command:


# svcadm disable name-service-cache

nscd will use a naming service, such as NIS, NIS+, or LDAP, only if the Service Management Facility (SMF) has enabled that service.

Forcibly Unmount the PCFS File System

This file system enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 11/06 release.

Starting with this release, you can use the -f option with the umount command to forcibly unmount the PCFS file system.

New Features in Solaris Express 10/06

This section describes all features that are new or have been enhanced in the Solaris Express 10/06 release.

System V Resource Controls for Zones

This system resource enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 10/06 release.

To limit the total amount of System V resources used by processes within a non-global zone, the following zone-wide resource controls are now included:

The resource controls are set through the add rctl resource property in zonecfg command for non-global zones.

To limit the global zone's consumption, the resource controls can be set through the prctl command.

For more information, see:

Internet Printing Protocol Client-Side Support

Client-side support for the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) enables Solaris client systems to communicate with IPP-based print services, such as those on the Linux and Mac OS X operating systems, as well as other platforms.

Small improvements are also featured in the server-side support for the IPP listening service. These improvements promote better interoperability, including some minor changes that result in a more standard representation of printer and job attribute data.

The IPP server and client implementation in the Solaris OS is one of several OpenSolarisTM printing projects that are currently under development. OpenSolaris printing provides a set of specifications and implementations of software that enables you to create standardized, scalable printing components for the Solaris and Linux software, or any operating system that contains a set of POSIX interfaces.

For more information, see the System Administration Guide: Solaris Printing.

For more information about OpenSolaris Printing, see http://opensolaris.org/os/community/printing/.

Selectable Use of localhost for Solaris Print Server Database Hostname

This printing feature enhancement was introduced in the Solaris Express 5/06 release.

This printing feature enables the Solaris print system to recognize and use localhost as the local host in the print system databases. In prior releases, /bin/hostname was used solely to generate the print hostname. The print system depended on this name remaining constant. The ability to use localhost as the name of the current system enables print servers to maintain the same print hostname, independent of the system's host name.

Note –

The modification applies to the setup of local print queues exclusively.

To support this feature, the following modifications are effective for the lpadmin command and the Solaris Print Manager graphical user interface (GUI):

For more information, see the following:

Single Hosts File

This networking enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 10/06 release.

Starting with this release, the Solaris OS does not have two separate hosts files. /etc/inet/hosts is the single hosts file that contains both IPv4 and IPv6 entries. Solaris system administrators do not need to maintain IPv4 entries in two hosts files that are always synchronized. For backward compatibility, the /etc/inet/ipnodes file is replaced with a symbolic link of the same name to/etc/inet/hosts.

For more information, see the hosts(4) man page and the ipnodes(4) man page.

SPARC: New sysidkbd Tool Configures Your Keyboard

This installation enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 10/06 release.

For SPARC based platforms, a new sysidtool, sysidkbd, configures your USB keyboard layout during system installation.

Note –

Previously, the USB keyboard attached on the SPARC platform always assumed a self-identifying value of one during the installation. Therefore, all of the keyboards that were not self-identifying always configured for a U.S. English keyboard during installation.

With the new sysidkbd tool, the following procedure occurs:

If the keyboard is not self-identifying and you want to prevent being prompted during your JumpStart installation, select the keyboard language in your sysidcfg script. For JumpStart installation, the default is for a U.S. English keyboard layout. To select another language, set the keyboard entry in your sysidcfg script as in this example:


keyboard=German
Note –

The value provided for sysidcfg must be a valid value. Otherwise, an interactive response is required during installation. Valid keyboard strings are defined in a file which is referenced in the sysidcfg(4) man page.

For more information, see the sysidcfg(4) man page and the sysidtool(1M) man page.

Device Naming Enhancements

This device management enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 10/06 release.

Starting with this release, the /dev name space supports multiple file system instances as needed. When the system is booted, a global instance of the /dev file system is created automatically. Subsequent /dev instances are created and mounted when needed. For example, when devices are added to a non-global zone. When a non-global zone is shut down, the available /dev instance is unmounted and unavailable.

In addition, device configuration is improved in the following ways:

Linker and Libraries Updates

This developer tools enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 10/06 release.

Starting with this release, there is greater flexibility in executing an alternative link-editor with the link-editor -z altexec64 option and the LD_ALTEXEC environment variable.

Symbol definitions that are generated using mapfiles can now be associated to the executable and linking format (ELF) sections.

The link-editors now enable the creation of static thread-local storage (TLS) within shared objects. In addition, a backup TLS reservation is established to provide for limited use of static TLS within post-startup shared objects.

New Features in Solaris Express 9/06

This section describes all features that are new or have been enhanced in the Solaris Express 9/06 release.

MPSS Extension to Non-ISM/DISM Anonymous Shared Memory

This system performance enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 9/06 release.

Starting with this release, Solaris large-page support has been enhanced by extending multiple page size support (MPSS) to the following:

In releases prior to Solaris Express 9/06, user applications could only map ISM/DISM SysV segments with large pages and there was no support for the use of large pages for segments created by MAP_SHARED mmap() of /dev/zero or mmap(). The new feature extends large-page support in the following two ways:

In prior releases, however, memcntl(MC_HAT_ADVISE) against MAP_SHARED mappings worked only against memory created by mapping regular files. The significant advantage of the MPSS extension feature is potential performance improvement for applications that create large non-ISM/DISM shared memory segments or have big MAP_SHARED /dev/zero or MAP_ANON mappings. This performance improvement is due to the reduction of TLB misses due to the use of larger pages.

GNOME-VFS and Nautilus ACL Support

This desktop tools enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 9/06 release.

Starting with this release, ACL support has been added to GNOME-VFS and Nautilus. The GNOME file manager now enables the file system access control lists to be accessed and modified. The GNOME-VFS and Nautilus ACL support feature brings an existing file system functionality to the desktop.

ZFS Option to Sort List Output

This file system enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 9/06 release.

Starting with this release, the zfs list command has two new options, -s and -S. These options are used to select the columns that are to be displayed and sorted.

For more information about zfs, see the zfs(1M) man page.

Improved Device in Use Error Checking

The following utilities have been enhanced to detect when a specified device is in use:

These enhancements mean that these utilities might detect some of the following usage scenarios:

For example, if you attempt to use the format utility to access an active device, you will see a message similar to the following:


# format
.
.
.
Specify disk (enter its number): 1
selecting c0t1d0
[disk formatted]
Warning: Current Disk has mounted partitions.
/dev/dsk/c0t1d0s0 is currently mounted on /. Please see umount(1M).
/dev/dsk/c0t1d0s1 is currently used by swap. Please see swap(1M).

However, these utilities do not detect all scenarios in the same way. For example, you can use the newfs command to create a new file system on a device in a live upgrade configuration. You cannot use the newfs command to create a new file system on a device that is part of a live upgrade configuration if it also has a mounted file system.

Non-Global Zones Now Installed With Limited Networking Configuration

A non-global zone is now installed with limited networking configuration (generic_limited_net.xml). This means, for example, that only the ssh login is enabled by default, and logins through rlogin and telnet must be added if needed.

The administrator can switch the zone to the open, traditional networking configuration (generic_open.xml) by using the netservices command, or enable and disable specific services by using the Service Management Facility (SMF) commands.

For more information about network configuration types, see Chapter 15, “Managing Services (Tasks)” in System Administration Guide: Basic Administration

For more information about the procedure to switch a non-global zone to a different network service configuration see, Chapter 22, “Logging In to Non-Global Zones (Tasks)” in System Administration Guide: Virtualization Using the Solaris Operating System

Adobe Flash Player Plug-in for Solaris

The Adobe Flash Player, formerly known as Macromedia Flash Player is the standard for delivering high-impact and rich web content. Designs, animation, and application user interfaces are deployed immediately across all browsers and platforms, attracting and engaging users with a rich web experience.

New Features in Solaris Express 8/06

This section describes all features that are new or have been enhanced in the Solaris Express 8/06 release.

OpenSSL 0.9.8a

This security enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 8/06 release.

OpenSSL 0.9.7d is upgraded to the stable OpenSSL 0.9.8a version. Some of the major changes in this version include:

Migration of Existing EMEA, Central and South American Locales to Common Locale Data Repository

This language support enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 8/06 release.

The locale data for existing European and Middle East and African (EMEA), Central and South American, and Oceania locales has been migrated to Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR) 1.3. This migration improves locale data quality and ensures consistency of locale data across code sets.

For more information about CLDR, see http://unicode.org/cldr.

hostname Command

This system administration tool enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 8/06 release.

Starting with this release, the hostname command has been re-implemented as a stand-alone binary executable program. The hostname command has also been enhanced with getopt(3C) support to detect and reject invalid command-line options.

Zone Unique Identifier

This system administration tool enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 8/06 release.

The Solaris system automatically attaches a globally unique identifier to each non-global zone when the zone is installed. This identifier can be retrieved both in the global zone and in the non-global zone by use of the zoneadm list -p command. Users can utilize the zone unique identifier for asset tracking by treating the zone as an asset by itself. This identifier can also be used for identification of zones across the following actions:

For more information, see the zoneadm(1M) man page.

Ability to Mark Zones as “Incomplete”

This system administration tool enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 8/06 release.

Starting with this release, users can mark zones as “incomplete” using a new zoneadm feature. This new zoneadm feature enables the recording of a fatal or permanent zone failure state by administrative software that updates the zone contents.

For more information, see the zoneadm(1M) man page.

Changes to How $TERM Value for Console is Set

This system administration enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 8/06 release.

The $TERM value is dynamically derived and depends on the terminal emulator that the console is using.

For more information, see the following:

Note –

This change does not impact how the terminal type is set for the serial port. You can still use the svccfg command to modify the $TERM value.

Solaris Zones Boot Enhancements

This system resource enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 8/06 release.

Solaris Zones Boot Enhancements now support boot arguments as part of boot and reboot. The following boot arguments are supported at this time:

Boot arguments can be passed in the following ways:

Boot arguments can also be persistently specified by using the new bootargs property in the zonecfg command:

zonecfg:myzone> set bootargs="-m verbose"

This setting will be applied unless overridden by the reboot, zoneadm boot or zoneadm reboot commands.

For more information on boot arguments and the bootargs property, see:

x86: Solaris Audio Driver for Ultra 20 M2 Workstation

This driver is new in the Solaris Express 8/06 release.

The audiohd driver is a Solaris High Definition audio driver for the Ultra 20 M2 Workstation. This new driver enables users to play “high definition” audio in the Ultra 20 M2 platform.

For more information, see the audiohd(7D) man page.

ld Link Editor for Object Files

This developer tool enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 8/06 release.

Starting with this release, the behavior of the ld command when creating a new version of an existing output file has been changed. This change addresses a long-term issue with the way new linker output files interact with running programs that are simultaneously using the old versions of those files.

If the file being created by ld already exists, the existing file is unlinked after all input files have been processed. A new file with the specified name is then created. This behavior enables the ld command to create a new version of the file, while simultaneously allowing existing processes that are accessing the old file contents to continue running. If the old file has no other links, the disk space of the file is freed when the last process referencing the file terminates.

In releases prior to Solaris Express 8/06, the existing file was not unlinked, and was instead over-written. However, this approach had the potential to corrupt any running processes that were using the file.

For more information, see the ld(1) man page.

Note –

The new behavior of the ld command has an implication for output files that have multiple hard links in the file system. Previously, all links would remain intact, with all links accessing the new file contents. The new ld behavior “breaks” such links, with the result that only the specified output file name references the new file. All the other links continue to reference the old file. To ensure consistent behavior on any Solaris version, applications that rely on multiple hard links to linker output files should explicitly remove and re-link the other file names.

Support for iSCSI Target Devices

This file system enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 8/06 release.

This Solaris release provides support for iSCSI target devices, which can be disk or tape devices. Releases prior to Solaris Express 8/06 provided support for iSCSI initiators. The advantage of setting up Solaris iSCSI targets is that, existing fibre channel devices can be connected to clients without the cost of fibre channel HBAs. In addition, systems with dedicated arrays can now export replicated storage with ZFS or UFS file systems.

You can use the iscsitadm command to set up and manage your iSCSI target devices. For the disk device that you select as your iSCSI target, you'll need to provide an equivalently sized ZFS or UFS file system as the backing store for the iSCSI daemon.

After the target device is set up, use the iscsiadm command to identify your iSCSI targets, which will discover and use the iSCSI target device.

For more information, see:

zfs snapshot Command

This file system enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 8/06 release.

Starting with this release, a new flag, -r, has been added to the zfs snapshot command. The new flag enables system administrators to take many snapshots at once. Using the -r flag, is easier than running multiple zfs snapshot commands and execution time is lessened.

For more information, see the zfs(1M) man page.

Solaris iSCSI Initiator

This device management enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 8/06 release.

Starting with this release, the Solaris iSCSI Initiator has been extended to support the creation of multiple iSCSI sessions to different IP addresses in the same iSCSI target portal group. This feature extends the iSCSI initiator's MPxIO support for a large number of additional storage arrays.

In releases prior to Solaris Express 8/06, the Solaris iSCSI Initiator supported the following actions:

For more information see, Chapter 14, Configuring Solaris iSCSI Targets and Initiators (Tasks), in System Administration Guide: Devices and File Systems.

PAPI Print Commands

This desktop tools enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 8/06 release.

The Free Standards Group (FSG) Open Printing API (PAPI) commands replace several commonly used print commands, which include the following:

The implementations of the Open Printing API commands are layered on top of the Free Standards Group Open Printing API in the Solaris OS. This implementation enables the commands to run on top of multiple protocols or services.

Some advantages of the new print command implementations include the following:

For more information about the PAPI print commands, see the following:

Enhancements to fstyp Command

The following enhancements to the fstyp command are new in the Solaris Express 8/06 release.

Starting with this release, the fstyp command has a new option, -a, which displays the file system attributes in a consistent, name-value pair format. This command also supports DOS logical drive numbers. For example:


# fstyp /dev/dsk/c0t0d0p0:1

For more information, see the fstyp(1M) man page.

The following fstyp enhancements are also available starting with this release:

Sun Java Web Console Changes

The Sun Java Web Console provides a common location for users to work with web-based management applications. Users access the console by logging in through an HTTPS port, using one of several supported web browsers. The single entry point that is provided by the console eliminates having to learn URLs for multiple applications. The console provides authentication and authorization services for all applications that are registered with the console.

All console-based applications conform to the same user interface guidelines. The Sun Java Web Console also provides auditing and logging services for all registered applications.

Starting with the Solaris Express 8/06 release, the Sun Java Web Console includes the following changes:

For more information, see “Java Web Console” in System Administration Guide: Basic Administration.

Note –

Starting with the Solaris Express 4/06, the Solaris ZFS web-based management tool is available in the Sun Java Web Console. This tool enables you to perform most of the administration tasks that you can perform with the command-line interface (CLI).

For more information about using the Solaris ZFS web-based management tool, see the Solaris ZFS Administration Guide.

New Features in Solaris Express 7/06

This section describes all features that are new or have been enhanced in the Solaris Express 7/06 release.

Ability to Validate a Non-Global Zone Migration Before the Migration Is Performed

This system resources enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 7/06 release.

Starting with this release, a zone migration dry run is performed before the actual non-global zone migration. The zoneadm detach subcommand can now generate a manifest on a running zone without actually detaching the zone. The zoneadm attach subcommand can then read this manifest and verify that the target machine has the correct configuration to host the zone without actually doing an attach.

For more information about procedures for migrating a non-global zone to a different machine and performing a dry run before the actual move, see the following:

Mailbox Size Enhancement

This networking enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 7/06 release.

The mail.local program delivers mail on the Solaris OS. In releases prior to Solaris Express 7/06, the mail client could support a maximum mailbox size of 2,147,483,647 bytes (or 2Gbytes - 1). This limitation has been removed. Now the mailbox size can be as large as any other Solaris supported file system.

For more information about mail.local, see the mail.local(1M) man page.

Exclusive Link-Based Failure Detection for IPMP Singleton

This networking enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 7/06 release.

Some sites use single-interface IP Multipathing (IPMP) groups in environments that cannot support probe-based network failure detection. Starting with this release, these sites can successfully deploy Solaris IPMP.

For more information about IPMP, see System Administration Guide: IP Services.

Runtime Linker Configuration File

This developer tool enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 7/06 release.

Runtime linker configuration files are created and managed with the crle command. These configuration files are used to alter default options for the Solaris runtime linker. In releases prior to Solaris Express 7/06, the runtime linker configuration files would encounter problems when used on AMD64 platforms. Starting with this release, the format of the runtime linker configuration files has been improved to resolve these problems. This improved format enables better file identification and ensures that the runtime linker does not use a configuration file generated on an incompatible platform.

Linker configuration files contain platform-specific binary data. A given configuration file can be interpreted by software with the same machine class and byte ordering. However, in releases prior to Solaris Express 7/06, the information necessary to enforce this restriction was not included in the linker configuration files.

Starting with this release, linker configuration files contain system identification information at the beginning of the file. This additional information is used by the crle command and the runtime linker to check the compatibility with linking configuration files. This information also allows the file command to properly identify linking configuration files. For backward compatibility, older linker configuration files will still be accepted but without the identification and error checks that are now available. When the update (-u) option is used on an older linker configuration file that lacks the system information, the crle command does not add system information to the result.

For more information, see the following man pages:

Solaris Fibre Channel Host-Based Logical Unit Number Masking

This device management enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 7/06 release.

The Solaris fibre channel logical unit number (LUN) masking feature enables system administrators to prevent the kernel from creating device nodes for specific unapproved LUNs.

For more information, see the fp(7d) man page.

Solaris Trusted Extensions

This security enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 7/06 release.

Starting with this release, the Solaris Trusted Extensions software provides multilevel security for the Solaris OS, including mandatory access control for the following:

The Solaris Trusted Extensions software also provides tools for the following actions:

The Solaris Trusted Extensions feature enables you to define your data access policies to control information in a flexible but highly secure manner. Solaris Trusted Extensions can be used as a configuration option for the Solaris OS.

For more information about Solaris Trusted Extensions, see the README and html files in the ExtraValue/Cobundled/tx directory.

Network Services Startup

This security enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 7/06 release.

Starting with this release, the generic installation has been changed. This change ensures that all network services, except ssh, are either disabled or restricted to respond to local requests only. The change to the generic installation also minimizes potential vulnerabilities that might be targeted by remote attackers.

Additionally, the network services startup feature enables customers to use only those services that they require. All of the affected services are controlled by the Service Management Framework (SMF). Any individual service can be enabled using the sycadm and syccfg commands. The netservices command can be used to switch the service startup behavior.

Gnome 2.14

This desktop tools enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 7/06 release.

Starting with this release, the Java DS includes the new Gnome 2.14 desktop. The Gnome 2.14 desktop introduces new features and enhances the performance of many of the commonly used applications.

Evince PDF and PostScript Viewer

This desktop tools enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 7/06 release.

Starting with this release, the Evince PDF and PostScript Viewer has been added to the Java DS.

Firefox 1.5

This browser enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 7/06 release.

Starting with this release, Firefox 1.5 has been added to the Java DS and will now be the default browser.

Thunderbird 1.5

This email enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 7/06 Release.

Starting with this release, Thunderbird 1.5 has been added to the Java DS and will now be the default email client.

Note –

The email client Evolution is still included in the Java DS.

Upgrading the Solaris OS When Non-Global Zones Are Installed

This installation enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 7/06 release.

The Solaris Zones feature provides the ability to configure non-global zones in a single instance of Solaris, the global zone. A non-global zone is an application execution environment in which processes are isolated from all other zones. If you are running a system with non-global zones installed, you can upgrade to the Solaris 7/06 release using, either the Solaris interactive installation program or custom JumpStart to upgrade. For details about using the Solaris interactive installation program, see the Solaris Express Installation Guide: Solaris Live Upgrade and Upgrade Planning. The process of upgrading with non-global zones installed has some limitations.

The ZFS File System

The following file system enhancements are new in the Solaris Express 7/06 release.

For more information about the ZFS file system, see ZFS Command Improvements and Changes.

New Features in Solaris Express 6/06

This section describes all features that are new or have been enhanced in the Solaris Express 6/06 release.

IPsec Policy Bypass Option While Running the ping Command

This networking enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 6/06 release.

In this release, the -b option has been added to the ping command. This option enables administrators to bypass global IPsec policy for a specified ping connection.

The IPsec policy bypass option enables isolating network issues from IPsec policy issues without changing or disabling global IPsec rules. Because, this option only affects the specified ping socket, encrypted and clear text pings can be run simultaneously. Only superuser or a user granted suitable privileges can use the IPsec policy bypass option.

For more information, see the ping(1M) man page.

Extended File Descriptor Limits For stdio

This system resource enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 6/06 release.

The Extended file descriptor limits for stdio feature removes the 256 FILE structure limitation on 32-bit Solaris processes. This feature provides both binary relief and programmatic interfaces.

For more information, see the following man pages:

Cloning Non-Global Zones With ZFS Zonepaths and Other ZFS Enhancements

This system resource enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 6/06 release.

The zoneadm clone command now automatically uses ZFS clone to clone a zone, when both the source and the target zonepaths reside on ZFS and are in the same pool.

The zoneadm clone command takes a ZFS snapshot of the source zonepath and sets up the target zonepath. The snapshot is named SUNWzoneX, where X is a unique ID which is used to distinguish between multiple snapshots. The destination zone's zonepath is used to name the ZFS clone. A software inventory is performed so that a snapshot used at a future time can be validated by the system.

Note that you can still specify that the ZFS zonepath be copied instead of ZFS cloned if desired.

To clone a source zone multiple times, a new parameter added to zoneadm command allows you to specify that an existing snapshot should be used. The system validates that the existing snapshot is usable on the target.

The zone installation process now has the capability to detect when a ZFS file system can be created for a zone. The process for uninstalling a zone can detect when a ZFS file system in a zone can be destroyed. These steps are then performed automatically by zoneadm.

MDI Enabling and Disabling of a Path

This system administration feature is new in the Solaris Express 6/06 release.

The MDI enabling and disabling functionality provides a path management mechanism to enable or disable a path for a target device. These new interfaces to MDI provide a user to enable or disable the path from a pHCI to a target-address and a client service address (LUN address in case of scsi_vhci). This feature can be used by diagnostic applications to ensure that no user I/O is routed on the path on which diagnostic operations are being performed.

For more information, see the mpathadm(1M) man page. See also Multipathing Administration Guide.

SIGEV_THREAD Event Notification

This language support enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 6/06 release.

The SIGEV_THREAD Event Notification feature implements the POSIX-specified SIGEV_THREAD notification mechanism. The SIGEV_THREAD notification mechanism calls a user-specified function in the context of a separate thread when an event occurs.

This feature also extends the implementation of the existing SIGEV_PORT notification mechanism to message queues. This extension enables uniform application of all Solaris-supported notification mechanisms to all interfaces that accept a sigevent structure to request asynchronous notification. The following Solaris notification mechanisms are supported:

For more information about the asynchronous notification mechanisms, see the signal.h(3HEAD) man page.

x86: Uncacheable Memory Access Support

This system performance enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 6/06 release.

On x86 and AMD64 architectures, modern graphics controller cards, such as NVIDIA or AGP require a mechanism to access uncacheable memory to enhance performance. The uncacheable memory access enables these graphic controller cards to keep coherency on the system with performance gain.

The uncacheable memory access support feature provides this functionality by using the ddi interfaces.

The following memory type are supported:

For more information, see the following man pages:

Predictive Self-Healing for PCI Express on x64 Systems

This system administration feature is new in the Solaris Express 6/06 release.

Starting with this release, the Solaris OS includes a set of predictive self-healing features to automatically capture and diagnose hardware errors detected on your system.

The Solaris Fault Manager automatically diagnoses failures in x64 hardware. Diagnostic messages are reported by the fmd daemon.

For more information about Fault Management in Solaris, see the following:

Default Desktop Session in dtlogin

This desktop enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 6/06 release.

Now, when a user logs into the Solaris Desktop for the first time, Java Desktop System (JDS) is the default desktop environment instead of the Common Desktop Environment (CDE). JDS has also become the default environment for users who chose a desktop environment on an older Solaris release that is no longer present in the Solaris release, such as OpenWindowsTM or GNOME 2.0.

System administrators can modify the dtlogin configuration to override the default choices by using the defaultDt and fallbackDt resources.

For more information about defualtDt and fallbackDt resources, see the dtlogin(1M)man page.

New Features in Solaris Express 5/06

This section describes all features that are new or have been enhanced in the Solaris Express 5/06 release.

Support for Descriptive Names for Metadevices and Hot-spare Pools

This system performance enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 5/06 release.

The rules for defining names for metadevices and hot-spare pools have been extended to allow the use of alphanumeric characters. Previously, names for metadevices were restricted to the form “dXXX”, while hot-spare pools had to use the form “hspYYY”.

For more information about the acceptable names for metadevices and hot-spare pools, see the Solaris Volume Manager Administration Guide.

File System Monitoring Tool (fsstat)

A new file system monitoring tool, fsstat, is available to report file system operations. Activity can be reported by mount point or by file system type.

The following fsstat example shows how to display all ZFS file system operations.


$ fsstat zfs
 new  name   name  attr  attr lookup rddir  read read  write write
 file remov  chng   get   set    ops   ops   ops bytes   ops bytes
8.26K  240K 6.34K 4.03M 6.33K  12.6M  482K  204K 1.24G 13.4K  363M zfs

The following fsstat example shows how to display file system operations for the /export/home mount point.


$ fsstat /export/home
 new  name   name  attr  attr lookup rddir  read read  write write
 file remov  chng   get   set    ops   ops   ops bytes   ops bytes
    0     0     0   972     0    224    22     0     0     0     0 /export/home

The following fsstat example illustrates how to display file system operations for all file system types.


$ fsstat -F
 new  name   name  attr  attr lookup rddir  read read  write write
 file remov  chng   get   set    ops   ops   ops bytes   ops bytes
1.71K 1.16K    37  371K   562  1.90M 1.04K  151K  142M 21.9K 55.3M ufs
    0     0     0 1.60K     0  2.93K   344 1.30K  761K     0     0 proc
    0     0     0     0     0      0     0     0     0     0     0 nfs
8.31K  240K 6.37K 4.04M 6.48K  12.6M  482K  204K 1.25G 13.7K  365M zfs
   29    12    12 37.4K     8  22.5K    28 1.04K 2.34M   120 76.1K lofs
10.8K 4.72K 5.43K 54.6K    49  19.8K    28  173K  610M  513K  487M tmpfs
    0     0     0   338     0      0     0    44 12.2K     0     0 mntfs
    1     1     1   429     1  14.3K   115 1.34K 1002K     0     0 nfs3
   12     6     9   150     0    442    30    91 3.32M    12 69.2K nfs4
    1     0     1 20.8K     0  20.5K     0     0     0     0     0 autofs

For more information, see the fsstat(1M) man page.

useradd Default Shell

These security enhancements are new in the Solaris Express 5/06 release.

In this release, the following new options have been added to the useradd -D utility:

For more information, see the useradd(1M) man page.

ZFS Pool Import Destroyed Pools

This file system enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 5/06 release.

In this release, the zpool command can now reimport previously destroyed pools that still have their data intact.

For more information, see the zpool(1M) man page.

For more information about the ZFS file system, see ZFS Command Improvements and Changes.

Configurable Privileges for Non-Global Zones

These system resources enhancements are new in the Solaris Express 5/06 release.

The zonecfg command can now be used to specify the set of privileges that processes are limited to in a non-global zone.

You can do the following:

Note the following:

For more information about configuring privileges for zones and zone privilege restrictions, see:

SO_TIMESTAMP Socket Option

This networking enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 5/06 release.

The SO_TIMESTAMP option enables or disables the reception of a timestamp with datagram. If the SO_TIMESTAMP option is enabled on a SOCK_DGRAM or SOCK_RAW socket, the recvmsg(2) call returns a timestamp in the native data format, corresponding to when the datagram was received.

For more information, see the following man pages:

NFSv4 Domain Name Configurable During Installation

This system administration feature is new the Solaris Express 5/06 release.

The NFS version 4 domain can now be defined during the installation of the OS. To facilitate this new functionality, the sysidnfs4 program runs during the installation process to determine whether an NFSv4 domain has been configured for the network. In previous Solaris 10 releases, the NFS domain name was defined during the first system reboot after installation.

The NFSv4 domain can now be defined as follows:

For information about the NFSv4 domain name configuration 

System Administration Guide: Network Services

For information about Solaris interactive installations 

Solaris 10 11/06 Installation Guide: Basic Installations

For information about Solaris network installations 

Solaris 10 11/06 Installation Guide: Network-Based Installations

For information about Custom JumpStart installations 

Solaris 10 11/06 Installation Guide: Custom JumpStart and Advanced Installations

For information about the sysid command tools

sysidtool(1M) and sysidnfs4(1M) man pages

Using DTrace in a Non-Global Zone

This system resource enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 5/06 release.

DTrace can now be used in a non-global zone when the dtrace_proc and dtrace_user privileges are assigned to the zone. DTrace providers and actions are limited in scope to the zone. With the dtrace_proc privilege, fasttrap and pid providers can be used. With the dtrace_user privilege, 'profile' and 'syscall' providers can be used.

You can add these privileges to the set of privileges available in the non-global zone by using the limitpriv property of the zonecfg command.

Configurable Privileges for Non-Global Zones provides an overview of privileges in a non-global zone.

For more information about zone configuration, specifying zone privileges, and using the DTrace utility, see:

64-bit SPARC: Extended Message Signaled Interrupt Support for Fire-based Platforms

This system resource enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 5/06 release.

Extended Message Signaled Interrupts (MSI-X) are an enhanced version of MSI interrupts. With MSI-X support, device driver writers have a choice between MSI and MSI-X interrupts. MSI-X interrupts are now supported on SPARC PCI-Experss platforms (Ultra 45 and Sun Fire T2000).

The new mdb/kmdb debugger command, ::interrupts, is also provided to retrieve a device's registered interrupt information on supported SPARC and x86 systems.

For more information, see Chapter 8, Interrupt Handlers, in Writing Device Drivers.

IPsec Kernel Module Error Logging

These system administration enhancements are new in the Solaris Express 5/06 release.

Starting with this release, all IPsec kernel module policy failures and other errors will be logged using the ipsec_rl_strlog() function. The ipsec_rl_strlog() function also has the ability to limit number of error messages sent to the system log. This ability prevents the system log from being overloaded.

The minimum interval between messages can be viewed or configured using the ndd command:


# ndd -get /dev/ip ipsec_policy_log_interval

The value returned is in milliseconds.

The ipsec_policy_log_interval now consolidates all IPsec-related error logging into a single function. This function also enables administrators to completely disable the error logging, as follows:


# ndd -set /dev/ip ipsec_policy_log_interval 0
Note –

After rebooting the system, you need to disable the IPsec logging again.

iSCSI Logout Support

This system administration feature is new in the Solaris Express 5/06 release.

The iSCSI log out support feature allows a user to logout from an iSCSI target without rebooting the host. When a user tries to remove or disable a discovery method or address and the target is not in use, the target logs out and cleans up all related resources. If the target is in use, the discovery address or method remains enabled and the logical unit in use message is logged. This feature introduces a new behavior to safely log out of unused devices without rebooting the host.

The following commands can be used to apply this feature:

A user is no longer required to reboot a host when an attached iSCSI storage is removed from the host.

For more information, see the iscsiadm(1M) man page. See also System Administration Guide: Devices and File Systems.

iSCSI MS/T Support

This system administration feature is new in the Solaris Express 5/06 release.

The iSCSI Multiple Session per Target (MS/T) support feature enables a user to create more iSCSI session or paths to a target as needed. The additional iSCSI paths provide higher bandwidth aggregation and availability in specific configurations. The iSCSI MS/T support feature should be used in combination with MPxIO or other multipathing software.

The new iscsiadm commands are as follows:

The iSCSI MS/T support feature enables higher bandwidth aggregation and availability to the administrators with iSCSI arrays that support login redirection.

For more information, see:

iSNS Client Support for iSCSI

This device management feature is new in the Solaris Express 5/06 release.

The Internet Storage Name Service (iSNS) client feature adds a new discovery option to the Solaris OS iSCSI software initiator. This option enables a user to use the iSNS to handle Internet Protocol SAN (IP-SAN) device discovery. This is off by default and is not platform-specific. The iSNS client introduces several iscsiadm command additions, modifications, and driver changes to handle iSNS discovery.

Users who use iSCSI to build block-based IP-SAN need a scalable way to manage device discovery and configuration for their SANs as they grow. The iSNS client feature supports a scalable method for device discovery in a large IP-SAN configuration that uses a minimal configuration.

For more information about the new and modified command-line options, see the iscsiadm(1M) man page. See also System Administration Guide: Devices and File Systems.

SNIA Multipath Management API support

This system administration feature is new in the Solaris Express 5/06 Release.

The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) Multipath Management API (MP API) defines standard interfaces for multipath devices, associated path discovery, and path administration on a host. This feature provides Sun's implementation of the SNIA MP API library for the scsi_vhci driver-based multipathing solution.

The SNIA MA API consists of the following components:

The following areas have been extended to support the SNIA MP API feature:

With this feature, the administrators can use the standards-based path administration for scsi_vhci multipath devices.

For more information see the mpathadm(1M) and libMPAPI(3LIB) man pages. See also the Solaris Fibre Channel Storage Configuration and Multipathing Support Guide.

New Features in Solaris Express 4/06

This section describes all features that are new or have been enhanced in the Solaris Express 4/06 release.

Common Agent Container

This system administration feature is new in the Solaris Express 4/06 release.

The Common Agent Container (CAC) is a stand-alone Java program that implements a container for Java management applications. CAC provides a management infrastructure designed for the management functionality based on Java Management Extensions (JMXTM) and the Java Dynamic Management Kit (JDMK). The SUNCacaort package installs the CAC software in the /usr/lib/cacao directory. Typically, CAC is not visible to the user or administrator.

Two occasions when an administrator might need to interact with the container daemon are as follows:

For more information, see the Chapter 14, Troubleshooting Software Problems (Overview), in System Administration Guide: Advanced Administration.

Predictive Self-Healing for x64 Systems

This system administration feature is new in the Solaris Express 4/06 release.

Starting with this release, the Solaris OS includes a set of predictive self-healing features to automatically capture, diagnose, and respond to hardware errors detected on your system.

The Solaris Fault Manager now provides support for CPU and Memory errors detected on x64 systems, including:

The Solaris Fault Manager automatically diagnoses failures in x64 hardware. The Solaris Fault Manager also attempts to automatically offline or isolate a faulty CPU, cache, or DRAM memory region. Diagnostic messages are reported by the fmd daemon.

For more information about Fault Management in Solaris, see:

Predictive Self-Healing Support for SNMP Notification

This system administration feature is new in the Solaris Express 4/06 release.

Starting with this release, the Solaris OS includes a set of predictive self-healing features to automatically capture, diagnose, and respond to hardware errors detected on your system. The self-healing diagnosis results are reported to the syslogd service.

The Solaris Fault Manager, fmd, now enables you to do the following:

The Fault Management MIB is located at /etc/sma/snmp/mibs/SUN-FM-MIB.mib on the Solaris system.

For more information about configuring SNMP on Solaris, see:

Java DTrace API

This system administration feature is new in the Solaris Express 4/06 release.

The Java Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) API is an interface to the native DTrace library. This interface provides support to develop visualization tools written in Java. The Java DTrace API comes installed in /usr/share/lib/java/dtrace.jar. This API allows multiple consumers of DTrace data to run simultaneously within a single Virtual Machine for the Java platform (JVMTM machine). Each consumer of the Java DTrace API listens for probe data and enables you to request consistent snapshots of aggregation data at any time.

For more information, see the JavadocTM API at /usr/share/lib/java/javadoc/dtrace/api/index.html.

mkdtemp() and mkstemps() Library Functions

The library functions mkdtemp() and mkstemps() have been added to Solaris Express 4/06. The mkdtemp() function enables creation of uniquely named directories. The mkstemps() function enables creation of uniquely named files with a specific suffix.

For more information, see the mkdtemp(3C) and mkstemps(3C) man pages.

Zone Migration in Solaris Containers Technology

This system administration feature is new in the Solaris Express 4/06 release.

This feature enables migration of non-global zones from one machine to another machine. The zonecfg and zoneadm commands have been modified to enable migration of non-global zones from one system to another. The migration procedure detaches a halted zone from its current location and attaches the zone to a new system.

The global zone on the target system must be running the following:

The zone detach process creates the information necessary to attach the zone on a different system. The zone attach process verifies that the new machine has the correct configuration to host the zone.

Because there are a number of ways to make the zonepath available on the new host, the actual movement of the zonepath from one system to another is a manual process that is performed by the global administrator.

Note –

When attached to the new system, the zone is in the installed state.

For more information on configuring privileges for zones and zone privilege restrictions, see

Sun Java Web Console

In the Solaris Express 4/06 release, an enhancement has been made to the Sun Java Web Console feature that was introduced in the Solaris Express 10/04 release. See ZFS Web-Based Management

In this release, the Solaris ZFS web-based management tool is available in the Sun Java web console.

For more information, see the Solaris ZFS Administration Guide.

Support for PCI Express (PCIe)

This feature has been modified in the Solaris Express 4/06 release.

This Solaris release provides support for the PCI Express (PCIe) interconnect for both SPARC and x86 based systems.

PCIe is designed to connect peripheral devices to the following applications:

The PCIe interconnect is an industry-standard, high-performance, serial I/O bus. For details on PCIe technology, go to http://www.pcisig.com.

The PCIe software provides the following features in this Solaris release:

The following cfgadm example output displays the hotpluggable PCIe devices on an x86 system. Note that this display might differ from platform to platform. Check your hardware platform guide for the correct cfgadm syntax.


# cfgadm pci
Ap_Id                          Type         Receptacle   Occupant     Condition
pcie1                          unknown      empty        unconfigured unknown
pcie2                          unknown      empty        unconfigured unknown
pcie3                          unknown      empty        unconfigured unknown
pcie4                          ethernet/hp   connected    configured   ok
pcie5                          pci-pci/hp   connected    configured   ok
pcie6                          unknown      disconnected unconfigured unknown

The administrative model for hotplugging PCIe peripherals is the same as for PCI peripherals, which also use the cfgadm command.

For more information, see the cfgadm_pci(1M) man page and System Administration Guide: Devices and File Systems. Check your hardware platform guide to ensure that PCIe and PCIe hotplug support are provided on your system. In addition, carefully review the instructions for physically inserting or removing adapters on your system, and review the semantics of device auto-configuration, if applicable.

PostgreSQL for the Solaris OS

This additional software is new in the Solaris Express 4/06 release.

PostgreSQL is a relational database system provided in the open-source community. More than 15 years of active development and a proven architecture have earned PostgreSQL a reputation for reliability, data integrity, and accuracy.

For more information, see http://www.postgresql.org.

ZFS Persistent Offline

This system administration enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 4/06 release.

In this release, the zpool offline command offline a device persistently by default. You can use the -t option to offline a device temporarily.

For more information, see the zpool(1M) man page.

For more information about the ZFS file system, see ZFS Command Improvements and Changes.

New Features in Solaris Express 3/06

This section describes all features that are new or have been enhanced in the Solaris Express 3/06 release.

32-bit: The gnome-pilot Utility

This desktop feature is new in the Solaris Express 3/06 release.

The gnome-pilot utility enables Palm users to synchronize their calendars, contacts and task lists between Evolution and their devices on the Solaris OS. This feature also enables the Palm user to back up and restore their devices on the Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS). The gnome-pilot feature supports synchronization with the PalmOS 4.x and the PalmOS 5.x.

IP_NEXTHOP Socket Option

This networking enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 3/06 release.

The IP_NEXTHOP is a new IP-level socket option that specifies the address of the next hop for the traffic that originates from the socket. An application that has the IP_NEXTHOP option set bypasses the routing table lookups on the destination and sends packets directly to the specified onlink nexthop.

Note –

The thread that sets the IP_NEXTHOP option must have the PRIV_SYS_NET_CONFIG privilege.

Basic Registration 1.1

This system administration feature is new in the Solaris Express 3/06 release.

Basic Registration 1.1 enables you to create a registration profile and ID to automate your Solaris software registrations. The software registration user interface has been changed. The procedure for registering Solaris software has also been changed in Basic Registration 1.1.

For more information about the software registration user interface changes and step-by-step instructions about how to register your Solaris software, see the System Administration Guide: Basic Administration.

Sun Update Connection

This system administration feature is new in the Solaris Express 3/06 release.

SunSM Update Connection, System Edition product now supports the default patchadd behavior from a global zone on a system where one or more non-global zones are installed.

For more information about the Sun Update Connection suite of products, see http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/coll/1320.2.

AES Counter Mode

This security enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 3/06 release.

Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is a block cipher recommended by the National Institute of Standard and Technology (NIST). When used in counter mode, a counter block is encrypted and the result is XOR with a block of plain text to produce cipher text. The counter mode is useful with block devices because the encryption or decryption of a block does not depend upon the prior encryption or decryption of any other block. The counter mode has been approved by NIST. This feature is only available to kernel consumers.

For more information, see the libpkcs11(3LIB) man page.

x86: SATA HBA Framework Support

This driver is new in the Solaris Express 3/06 release.

The Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) HBA framework project delivers a generic SATA framework for the Marvell 88SX60xx, Marvell 88SX50xx, and the Silicon Image 3124 controllers. The new SATA HBA drivers and framework provide native support for accessing SATA controllers and disks. These drivers provide features, such as hot plugging and queueing of multiple commands that are unique to SATA. These SATA drivers interface with the sd (target disk) driver and support the sd functionality.

For more information, see the following man pages:

Coherent Console

This console subsystem feature is new in the Solaris Express 3/06 release.

The coherent console feature implements a part of the kernel console subsystem to facilitate rendering console output, The coherent console uses the Solaris kernel mechanisms to render console output rather than Programmable Read-Only Memory (PROM) interfaces. This reduces the console rendering dependence on OnBoot PROM (OBP).

The coherent console uses a kernel-resident framebuffer driver to generate console output. The generated console output is more efficient than using OBP rendering. The coherent console also avoids idling CPUs during SPARC console output and enhances the user experience.

For example, the coherent console increases the SPARC console text throughput and scrolling rate and provides ANSI color.

x86: Xorg X Server Version 6.9

This X11 windowing feature enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 3/06 release.

The Xorg X Server for x86 and x64 platforms has been upgraded from version 6.8.2 to version 6.9 by the X.Org Foundation and the open source community. The new version adds support for more graphics devices including new models from ATI, XGI, VIA, and Intel. The Xorg X Server version 6.9 also adds keyboard and mouse handling improvements, performance enhancements, and bug fixes.

For further information, see the Xorg(1) man page.

Resource Pools Service FMRIs

This system resource enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 3/06 release.

Resource pools and dynamic resource pools have been integrated into the Solaris Service Management Framework Facility (SMF). The dynamic resource pools are now enabled separately from the resource pools service.

The Fault Management Resource Identifier (FMRI) for dynamic resource pools service is: svc:/system/pools/dynamic. The resource pools service FMRI is: svc:/system/pools. The enabling and disabling mechanisms through pooladm command are also still available.

Note that when a system with pools enabled is upgraded, if an /etc/pooladm.conf file exists, the pools service is enabled.

For more information, see the System Administration Guide: Virtualization Using the Solaris Operating System. See also the following man pages:

32-bit: RealPlayer for the Solaris OS

This additional software is new in the Solaris Express 3/06 release.

RealPlayer enables users to access and manage digital media. RealPlayer supports the following digital media formats:

The RealPlayer feature enhances the multimedia experience for Java Desktop System (JDS) users.

Zero-CountryCode Keyboard Layout Support

This language support enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 3/06 release.

This feature provides a new command option kbd -s language. This option enables users to configure keyboard layouts in kernel. The Zero-CountryCode keyboard layout feature is particularly useful on SPARC systems. In prior releases, all “non-self-ID keyboards” were always recognized as US layout keyboard on SPARC systems.

For more information, see kbd(1) man page.

Using Compact Flash as ATA Disk

This system resource enhancement is new in Solaris Express 3/06 release.

Compact Flash (CF) can be used as an Advanced Technology Attachment (ATA) disk with a CF<->ATA adapter. Using CF as an ATA disk provides a reliable bootable program and data storage device. This feature also improves the flexibility and reliability of the storage solution for your PC or application.

For more information, see the ata(7D) man page.

Zone Move and Clone Features in the Solaris Containers Technology

This system resources enhancement is new in Solaris Express 3/06 release.

Two new subcommands, moveand clone, have been added to the zoneadm command. Zone move and clone features enable the following operations:

For more information, see the zoneadm(1M) man page. See also theSystem Administration Guide: Virtualization Using the Solaris Operating System.

New Features in Solaris Express 2/06

This section describes all features that are new or have been enhanced in the Solaris Express 2/06 release.

Solaris Flash Archives

This installment enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 2/06 release.

This Solaris Flash enhancement enables a user to create an archive that includes large files. The flarcreate command creates a Solaris Flash archive that can contain individual files of 4-Gbyte or more. The available archive utilities are:

The pax utility was included in the Solaris 7 OS release. The Solaris Flash archives created by using the pax utility can only be deployed on a Solaris OS with a pax utility. When a user deploys the archive on systems that are running the Solaris 2.6 or earlier versions, the user must use the -L cpio option.

For more information, see the pax(1) and the cpio(1) man pages. See also the Solaris Express Installation Guide: Solaris Flash Archives (Creation and Installation).

New fallocate Utility

This feature is new in the Solaris Express 2/06 release.

The fallocate utility enables contiguous allocation of capacity on a supported file system. The UNIX file system support for fallocate provides higher performance for programs that are performing sequential access to data.

For more information, see the fallocate(2) man page.

IIIMF and Language Engines

These language support enhancements are new in the Solaris Express 2/06 release.

The Internet Intranet Input Method Framework (IIIMF) has been upgraded from rev.10 to rev.12.

This framework provides the following new features:

Each language engine has also been upgraded to the IIIMF rev.12 base. The Japanese language engines, ATOK12 and Wnn6, have been updated to “ATOK for Solaris” and Wnn8 respectively. “ATOK for Solaris” is equivalent to ATOK17. A new Chinese chewing input method has also been added to the IIIMF.

32-bit: Palm Synchronization with USB Port

This desktop feature is new in the Solaris Express 2/06 release.

The palm synchronization feature enables Palm devices synchronization through USB ports on the Solaris OS. This feature provides support to synchronize mobile devices such as Palm tops with desktops.

For further information, see the gpilotd-control-applet(1) man page.

The logadm Utility

This system administration feature in new in the Solaris Express 2/06 release.

The logadm utility provides the -l option to rotate the log file timestamps with local time. The -l option enables logadm to use the local time while naming files. This option does not change how timestamps are stored in log files.

For further information, see the logadm(1M) man page.

New Features in Solaris Express 1/06

This section describes all features that are new or have been enhanced in the Solaris Express 1/06 release.

ZFS Web-Based Management Feature

In the Solaris Express 1/06 release, an enhancement has been made to the ZFS feature that was introduced in the Solaris Express 12/05 release. For a description of this ZFS enhancement, see ZFS Web-Based Management.

x86: PCI Express Support on x86 Systems

This device management feature is new in the Solaris Express 1/06 release.

This Solaris release provides support for the PCI Express (PCIe) interconnect. PCIe is designed to connect peripheral devices to desktop, enterprise, mobile, communication, and embedded applications.

The PCIe interconnect is an industry-standard, high-performance, serial I/O bus. For details on PCIe technology, go to the following site:

http://www.pcisig.com

The PCIe software provides the following features in this Solaris release:

The following cfgadm example output displays the hotpluggable PCIe devices on an x86 system. Note that the display below may differ from platform to platform. Check your hardware platform guide for the correct cfgadm syntax.


# cfgadm pci
Ap_Id     Type         Receptacle   Occupant     Condition
pcie1     unknown      empty        unconfigured unknown
pcie2     unknown      empty        unconfigured unknown
pcie3     unknown      empty        unconfigured unknown
pcie4     etherne/hp   connected    configured   ok
pcie5     pci-pci/hp   connected    configured   ok
pcie6     unknown      disconnected unconfigured unknown

The administrative model for hotplugging PCIe peripherals is the same as for PCI peripherals, which uses the cfgadm command.

For more information, see the cfgadm_pci(1M) man page and the System Administration Guide: Devices and File Systems. Check your hardware platform guide to ensure that PCIe and PCIe hotplug support is provided on your system. In addition, carefully review the instructions for physically inserting or removing adapters on your system. And, review the semantics of device auto-configuration, if applicable.

SSL Proxy Module

This security enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 1/06 release.

A kernel level SSL proxy server has been added in this release. The proxy simplifies and accelerates the SSL/TLS protocol implementation by pushing handshake and records processing to the kernel. The proxy supports the most commonly used cipher suites. Applications, such as webservers, can be enabled to offload the handling of the SSL operations with those cipher suites to the proxy, and seamlessly fall back to their existing user-level SSL l library for the others.

For more information, see the ksslcfg(1M) man page.

TCP_INIT_CWND Socket Option

This networking enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 1/06 release.

The new TCP socket option, TCP_INIT_CWND, enables an application to override the settings in the initial TCP congestion window, as described in RFC 3390, “Increasing TCP's Initial Window.” By default, TCP sets the initial congestion window at connection set up time and after an idle period. (An idle period is when no traffic occurs between the two ends of the TCP connection. An application can use the TCP_INIT_CWND socket option to set the initial congestion window to a specified number of TCP segments. So the value of this new socket option is used both at the connection start time and after an idle period to set the initial congestion window. The process must have the PRIV_SYS_NET_CONFIG privilege if a number greater than that calculated by RFC 3390 must be specified.

For further information, see the tcp(7P) man page.

x64: Watchdog Timeout Feature

This additional software is new in the Solaris Express 1/06 release.

The Watchdog mechanism detects a system hang. This feature is a timer that is continually reset by a user application as long as the operating system and user application are running. While the watchdog timer is operating in application mode, an additional alarm function, Alarm 3, is available to generate alarms in case of critical problems in the user application.

Object Migration and Interoperability Enhancements for pktool

This security enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 1/06 release.

The pktool command enables users to manage PKCS#11 objects. New subcommands have been added that can be used to move, display, and delete PKCS#11 objects. The subcommands can also show which PKCS#11 tokens are available. These operations help migrate cryptographic objects to or from the default Sun Software PKCS#11 softtoken or from other PKCS#11-compliant tokens.

For further information, see the pktool(1) man page.

Deimos Cryptographic Accelerator

This driver support is new in the Solaris Express 1/06 release.

The DCA driver supports Sun's SCA1000 and SCA500 cryptographic accelerator cards. Additionally, the driver will support Broadcom's 5820, 5821, and 5822 cards.

All of these cards support the following operations:

The driver acts as cryptographic service provider to the Solaris Cryptographic Framework. The driver can be used by anyone who uses this framework.

HBA Drivers

These driver enhancements have been added to the Solaris Express 1/06 release.

The following HBA drivers have been added to the Solaris OS to support the full family of QLogic and Emulex HBA products which includes the following Sun and non-Sun HBAs:

These HBA drivers provide choice of selection with a single fibre channel implementation. The supported HBAs are Solaris-ready certified and also enable PCI-X and PCIe 4 Gbyte HBA support.

For further information, refer to the following links:

Driver Support for New STK Tape Drive 10000 “Titanium”

This driver support is new in the Solaris Express 1/06 release.

This release adds the st driver, a driver for SCSI tape devices. This feature provides support for the new StorageTekTM tape drive T10000A “Titanium.”

For further information, see the st(7D) man page.

x86: Driver Support for AMD64 Platform

This driver support is new in the Solaris Express 1/06 release.

In this release, the glm driver has been ported to the x64 platform. This driver enables you to use the x4422a card on the AMD64 platform.

For further information, see the glm(7D) man page.

USB-to-Serial Driver for Prolific Adapters

This driver is new in the Solaris Express 1/06 release.

This USB-to-serial driver supports Prolific pl2303 chipset-based adapters. With this new driver, customers can choose between Edgeport adapters and Prolific adapters.

For more information, see usbsprl(7D) man page.

USB-to-Serial Driver for Keyspan Adapters

This driver is new in the Solaris Express 1/06 release.

A new driver is provided in the release for Keyspan USB-to-serial adapters. This driver supports the USA-19HS model. With this new driver, customers have a choice between Edgeport adapters and Keyspan adapters.

For further information, see the usbsksp(7D) man page.

New Features in Solaris Express 12/05

This section describes all features that are new or have been enhanced in the Solaris Express 12/05 release.

The ZFS File System

This file system enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 12/05 release.

This Solaris Express release includes ZFS, a new 128-bit file system. ZFS provides simple administration, transactional semantics, end-to-end data integrity, and immense scalability. ZFS is not an incremental improvement to existing technology. Rather, ZFS is a fundamentally new approach to data management.

ZFS uses a pooled-storage model that completely eliminates the concept of volumes. Thus, ZFS eliminates the associated problems of partition management, provisioning, and growing file systems. Thousands of file systems can all draw from a common storage pool. Each system consumes only as much space as actually needed. The combined I/O bandwidth of all devices in the pool is available to all file systems at all times.

All operations are “copy-on-write” transactions, so the on-disk state is always valid. Every block has a checksum, so silent data corruption is impossible. In addition, the data is self-healing in replicated configurations. This feature means that if one copy is damaged, ZFS detects the damage and uses another copy to repair the damaged copy.

ZFS is Easy to Administer

For system administrators, the greatest improvement of ZFS over traditional file systems is the ease of administration.

ZFS takes a single command to set up a mirrored storage pool and file system. For example:


# zpool create home mirror c0t1d0 c1t2d0

The above command creates a mirrored storage pool named home and a single file system named home. The file system is mounted at /home.

With ZFS, you can use whole disks instead of partitions to create the storage pool.

Then, you can use the /home file system hierarchy to create any number of file systems beneath /home. For example:


# zfs create home/user1

For more information, see the zpool(1M) and zfs(1M) man pages.

In addition, ZFS provides the following administration features:

For more information, see the Solaris ZFS Administration Guide.

ZFS Command Improvements and Changes

The following section describes recent improvements and changes to the ZFS command interface in the Solaris Express release.

For more information about these improvements and changes, see the Solaris ZFS Administration Guide.

ZFS Web-Based Management

The Solaris Express 1/06 release includes the ZFS web-based management tool, which enables you to perform much of the administration that you can do with the ZFS command line interface. You can perform the following administrative tasks with the ZFS Administration console:

You can access the ZFS Administration console through a secure web browser at the following URL:


https://system-name:6789

If you type the appropriate URL and are unable to reach ZFS Administration console, the server might not be started. To start the server, run the following command:


# /usr/sbin/smcwebserver start

If you want the server to run automatically when the system boots, run the following command:


# /usr/sbin/smcwebserver enable

ZFS and Solaris Zones

The Solaris Zones partitioning technology supports ZFS components, such as adding ZFS file systems and storage pools into a zone.

For example, the file system resource type in the zonecfg command has been enhanced as follows:


zonecfg:myzone> add fs
zonecfg:myzone:fs> set type=zfs
zonecfg:myzone:fs> set dir=/export/share
zonecfg:myzone:fs> set special=tank/home
zonecfg:myzone:fs> end

For more information, see the zonecfg(1M) man page and the Solaris ZFS Administration Guide.

Solaris Installation Tool Support of ZFS File Systems

In this release, the following Solaris installation tool support is provided:

New Solaris ACL Model

ZFS implements a new ACL model. Previous versions of the Solaris OS only supported an ACL model that was primarily based on the POSIX ACL draft specification. The POSIX-draft based ACLs are used to protect UFS files. A new model that is based on the NFSv4 specification is used to protect ZFS files.

The main features of the new ACL model are as follows:

The recently revised chmod(1) man page adds many new examples that demonstrate usage with ZFS. The acl(5) man page has an overview of the new ACL model. In addition, the Solaris ZFS Administration Guide provides extensive examples of using ACLs to protect ZFS files.

IPv6 for IP Filter

This security enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 12/05 release.

Solaris IP Filter has been enhanced to include IPv6 packet filtering. IPv6 packet filtering can filter based on the source IPv6 address, destination address, poolsl containing IPv6 addresses, and IPv6 extension headers.

The -6 option has been added to the ipf command for use with IPv6. Use the -6 option to load and flush IPv6 packet filtering rules. The ipstat command also has a -6 option, which is used to display IPv6 statistics.

Although there is no change to the command line interface for the ipmon and ippool commands, these commands also support IPv6. The ipmon command has been enhanced to accommodate the logging of IPv6 packets. The ippool command supports the creation of IPv6 pools.

You can use the ipf6.conf file to create packet filtering rule sets for IPv6. By default, the ipf6.conf configuration file is included in the /etc/ipf directory. As with the other filtering configuration files, the ipf6.conf file loads automatically during the boot process when it is stored in the /etc/ipf directory.

For further information about Solaris IP, see the System Administration Guide: IP Services.

Support for Descriptive Names in Solaris Volume Manager

This system administration enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 12/05 release.

Descriptive names for both volumes and hot spare pools enable system administrators to name volumes and hot spare pools by using any name that follows the naming guidelines. Additionally, the -D option has been added to the metstat command. This option enables the user to list volumes and to list hot spare pools with descriptive names.

For more information, see the Solaris Volume Manager Administration Guide.

PKCS #11 v2.20 Support in the Solaris Cryptographic Framework

This security enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 12/05 release.

This feature adds RSA PKCS #11 v2.20 support to the Solaris Cryptographic Framework, including the stronger SHA2 algorithms.

For a list of mechanisms that v2.20 provides, see the pkcs11_softtoken(5) man page. For a list of mechanisms that are available to users, see the digest(1) and mac(1) man pages.

UDP and TCP Performance Enhancement

This networking enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 12/05 release.

Performance of both the TCP protocol and the UDP protocol has been enhanced in this release. The enhancements result in lower latency and higher throughput for both transmit and receive performance. Network applications yield better performance due to system performance improvements. In particular, those applications which heavily transmit and receive UDP packets or utilize TCP loopback connections show greatest benefit.

For more information, see the ip(7P), tcp(7P), and udp(7P) man pages. See also the Solaris Tunable Parameters Reference Manual.

Zone Rename Feature in Solaris Containers Technology

This system resources enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 12/05 release.

The zone name is now an attribute that can be set through the zonecfg command. See the zonecfg(1M) man page for the procedure to change the name of a zone.

Only zones in the configured state or the installed state can be renamed. For information about zones states, see the zones(5) man page.

Advanced DDI Interrupt Framework

This device management enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 12/05 release.

The Solaris OS provides a new DDI interrupt framework for registering interrupts and for deregistering interrupts. Support for Message Signaled Interrupts (MSIs) is also provided. Management interfaces enable you to manipulate priorities and capabilities, to perform interrupt masking, and to obtain pending information.

For a list of the new interfaces, see Interrupt Functions in Writing Device Drivers. For a list of interrupt functions that are obsolete and should not be used, see the “B-3 Deprecated Interrupt Functions” table within this section.

For more information, see Chapter 8, Interrupt Handlers, in Writing Device Drivers. See also the individual man pages for the interfaces. All man pages for these interfaces are in the 9F man page section.

VLAN Support with xge 10Gb Ethernet Driver

This networking enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 12/05 release.

VLAN support with xge enables system administrators to configure Virtual LAN over a 10-Gbyte Ethernet. This enhancement is the first VLAN implementation with 10-Gbyte Ethernet driver in the Solaris OS. The dladm command can be used to configure VLAN with great flexibility.

For further information and VLAN configuration instructions, see the dladm(1M) man page.

Core Kerberos Mechanism Resync with MIT 1.4

This security enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 12/05 release.

The Kerberos_V5 GSS mechanism library has been synced with MIT Kerberos 1.4.0. This version includes fine-grained multithread support.

SPARC: Adobe Acrobat Reader 7.0.1

This desktop enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 12/05 release.

In this release, Adobe® Acrobat Reader is updated from version 5.0 to version 7.0.1. Adobe Reader enables you to view, navigate, and print Portable Document Format (PDF) files. This enhancement is for the SPARC platform.

rge Driver

This driver support is new in the Solaris Express 12/05 release. The rge driver provides support for Realtek RTL8169S/8110S Gigabit Ethernet devices.

For further information, refer to the rge(7D) man page.

New UTF-8 Locales

This language support enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 12/05 release.

Over 50 new UTF-8 locales have been introduced in this release. As a result, Unicode support is now provided for all European, Middle Eastern, and Asian (EMEA) locales which lack a UTF-8 charset variant. Furthermore, locales for Cyprus, Luxembourg, and Malta are now available for the first time. Therefore, locales for all 25 European Union (EU) member states are now supported.

New Features in Solaris Express 11/05

This section describes all features that are new or have been enhanced in the Solaris Express 11/05 release.

Improvements to Volume Management (vold)

This volume management feature is new in the Solaris Express 11/05 release.

In this release, removable media management is improved. Previously, vold did not create device links for removable devices that contain no media. Now, device links are properly created for devices that contain no media, similar to the following:


lrwxrwxrwx  1 root  root     28 Jun 13 13:09 /vol/dev/aliases/cdrom0 
-> /vol/dev/rdsk/c2t2d0/nomedia

Now, you can use the cdrw command and the rmformat command to list devices that have no media when vold is running.

You can revert back to the previous vold behavior by changing the following support nomedia entry in the /etc/vold.conf file as follows:


support media

For more information, see the vold.conf(4) man page.

In addition, vold is now hot-plug aware. This improvement means that if you insert removable media, the media is automatically detected and mounted by vold. You do not need to restart vold manually to recognize and mount a file system from any removable media device.

For more information using these volume management improvements, see What’s New in Removable Media? in System Administration Guide: Devices and File Systems.

vold is Managed by the Service Management Facility (SMF)

This volume management feature is new in the Solaris Express 11/05 release.

The volume management daemon, vold, is now managed by the Service Management Facility (SMF). This means you can use the svcadm disable command to disable the following new volfs service, if appropriate:


# svcadm disable volfs

You can identify the status of the volfs service by using this command:


$ svcs volfs
STATE          STIME    FMRI
online         Sep_29   svc:/system/filesystem/volfs:default

For more information, see the smf(5), volfs(7FS), and vold(1M) man pages.

For more information about managing the volfs service, see What’s New in Removable Media? in System Administration Guide: Devices and File Systems.

UFS Utility Enhancements

This file system enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 11/05 release.

The UFS file system check utility, fsck, has been enhanced to include features from the FreeBSD 4.9 version of the fsck program, as well as other enhancements.

The fsck utility in this Solaris release includes the following improvements:

In addition, the newfs and mkfs commands have been updated to include new options for displaying a file system's superblock information in text or dumping the superblock information in binary format.


newfs [ -S or -B ] /dev/rdsk/...
-S

Displays the file system's superblock in text

-B

Dumps the file system's superblock in binary


mkfs [ -o calcsb or -o calcbinsb ] /dev/rdsk/... size
-o calcsb

Displays the file system's superblock in text

-o calcbinsb

Dumps the file system's superblock in binary

The fsck utility uses this superblock information to search for backup superblocks.

For more information about these enhancements, see Chapter 17, Managing File Systems (Overview), in System Administration Guide: Devices and File Systems.

Internet Key Exchange (IKE) Enhancment

This security enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 11/05 release.

The ikecert utility now can copy keys and certificates that are on the disk to a hardware keystore device. The utility can also link existing key objects and certificate objects to the IKE database.

For more information, see the ikecert(1M) man page.

cdrecord, readCD, and cdda2wav Available

This device management feature is new in the Solaris Express 11/05 release.

Previously, cdrecord was available on companion CD. In this release, cdrecord is now available in the Solaris OS. cdrecord is a powerful tool for burning CDs. cdrecord supports more burners than cdrw does. cdrecord works better with USB and 1394 external burners. cdrecord is, however, limited to DVD images that are less than 2 Gbytes.

For further information, see the cdrecord, readCD, cdda2wav man pages in the /usr/share/man directory.

pilot-link Software

This Open Source software is new in the Solaris Express 11/05 release.

Pilot-link is a suite of tools that enables you to connect your Palm or PalmOS® compatible handheld with Unix, Linux, and any other POSIX-compatible machine. pilot-link works with almost all PalmOS handhelds. To sync Palm devices with Solaris by USB port, pilot-link makes use of libusb. For further information, see the libusb(3LIB).

This release of pilot-link is based on pilot-link v0.12.0-pre4.

For further information, see http://www.pilot-link.org. See also pilot-xfer(1) in the /usr/sfw/man directory.

New Features in Solaris Express 10/05

This section describes all features that are new or have been enhanced in the Solaris Express 10/05 release.

mediaLib 2.3

This feature is new in the Solaris Express 10/05 release.

mediaLib is a low-level application library for building portable, high-performance, multimedia applications. These applications are useful in the telco, bioinformatics, and database fields. mediaLib 2.3 introduces a multithreaded (MT) library for better performance on multiprocessor systems. mediaLib 2.3 also introduces 340 new functions.

For further information, see the libmlib(3LIB) and libmlib_mt(3LIB) man pages. See also http://www.sun.com/processors/vis/mlib.html.

New Features in Solaris Express 9/05

This section describes all features that are new or have been enhanced in the Solaris Express 9/05 release.

Dynamic Interrupt Distribution

This system performance enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 9/05 release.

The intrd daemon monitors loads on the system that are due to interrupts. If an imbalance is detected, the daemon retargets interrupts to new CPUs in order to balance the interrupt load. This feature should improve system performance under high interrupt loads.

The daemon is started by the new SMF service, svc:/system/intrd.

For more information, see the intrd(1M) man page.

New Features in Solaris Express 8/05

This section describes all features that are new or have been enhanced in the Solaris Express 8/05 release.

Set SMTP to Use Transport Layer Security

This security enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 8/05 release.

The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) can use Transport Layer Security (TLS) in version 8.13 of sendmail. When enabled, this service to SMTP servers and clients provides private, authenticated communications over the Internet, as well as protection from eavesdroppers and attackers.

For more information, see the System Administration Guide: Network Services.

Driver for IEEE-1394 Based (IIDC) Digital Camera

This driver is new in the Solaris Express 8/05 release.

This driver enables support of IEEE-1394 based (IIDC) digital cameras. By supporting a software interface for camera control and image capture, the driver also enables development of applications that attach to these devices. This driver supports devices that implement the 1.04 version of the 1394 Trade Association 1394-based Digital Camera Specification. Support also covers devices that are backwards compatible.

Refer to the dcam1394(7D) man page for more information.

SCSI HBA Driver for LSI MegaRAID 320-2x SCSI RAID Controller

This driver is new in the Solaris Express 8/05 release.

This release introduces the lsimega driver. The LSI 320-2x card is supported by lsimega with back-end support from LSI. 2. Sun FireTM V20z/V40z servers with the optional 320-2x RAID card receive better support for RAID disk I/O and pass through I/O for SCSI tape and CDROM 3.

For further information, see the lsimega(7D) man page.

USB CCID IFD Handler

This driver is new in the Solaris Express 8/05 release.

This release delivers a userland device driver for USB CCID-compliant smart card readers. This feature uses the USB CCID IFD Handler that is part of the MUSCLE project. With this feature integrated into Solaris, customers can now use a wide variety of USB smart card readers on Solaris systems that have USB ports.

For further information, see the usb_ccid_ifd(3SMARTCARD) man page.

More documentation is available at the public MUSCLE card web site at http://www.musclecard.com.

New Features in Solaris Express 7/05

This section describes all features that are new or have been enhanced in the Solaris Express 7/05 release.

x86: AGPgart Driver for x86 Systems

This driver is new in the Solaris Express 7/05 release.

AGPgart driver is an xserver kernel module that uses system memory to enhance graphics display. This feature is useful for memoryless graphics devices such as Intel integrated graphics and AGP graphics, which need to use system memory as video buffers.

Desktop users who use Intel 810/830/855 series graphics devices can achieve higher resolution of screen images under Xorg xserver with only 1 megabyte of BIOS-allocated video RAM. Video driver developers can utilize the AGPgart driver to allocate system memory for 2-D display or 3-D display and to manage AGP devices.

For more information, see the agpgart_io(7I) man page.

x86: New prtconf Option to Display Product Names

This system administration tool enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 7/05 release.

A new -b option has been added to the prtconf command. This option displays the product name of a system. This option is similar to the uname -i command. However, the prtconf -b command is specifically designed to determine the marketing name of a product.

The -b option displays the following root properties from the firmware device tree:

To display additional platform-specific output that might be available, add the -v option to the prtconf -b command.

For more information, see the prtconf(1M) man page and the System Administration Guide: Advanced Administration.

New Features in Solaris Express 6/05

This section describes all features that are new or have been enhanced in the Solaris Express 6/05 release.

x86: GRUB-Based Booting

This system performance enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 6/05 release.

The Solaris OS is now loaded with the open source GRand Unified Bootloader (GRUB). GRUB is responsible for loading a boot archive, which contains the kernel modules and configuration files, into the system's memory. The Solaris kernel boots based on the contents of the in-memory boot archive.

Because the Solaris kernel is fully compliant with the Multiboot Specification, you can boot the Solaris OS on an x86 based system by using GRUB. With GRUB, you can more easily boot the various operating systems that are installed on your system. For example, on one x86 system, you could boot the following operating systems:

A key benefit of GRUB is that it is intuitive about file systems and kernel executable formats. This feature enables you to load an operating system without recording the physical position of the kernel on the disk. With GRUB-based booting, the kernel is loaded by specifying its file name, the drive, and the partition where the kernel resides.

One notable change is the replacement of the Device Configuration Assistant (DCA) with the GRUB menu. When an x86 based system boots, the GRUB menu is displayed. From this menu, you can select an OS instance by using the up-arrow and down-arrow keys. If you do not make a selection, the default OS instance is booted.

The GRUB-based boot feature provides the following improvements:

In addition, the following two administrative commands have been added to assist with managing system bootability:

bootadm

This command rebuilds the boot archive.

installgrub

This command installs GRUB boot blocks.

Note –

As a part of this functionality, x86 based systems must have a minimum of 256 Mbytes of RAM to boot and install the Solaris Express 6/05 release.

For more information about these enhancements, see System Administration Guide: Devices and File Systems and System Administration Guide: Basic Administration. See also the bootadm(1M), grub(5), and installgrub(1M) man pages.

See the following resources for additional installation information:

Large Pages Enhancement

This system performance enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 6/05 release.

This feature brings the benefits of large pages to a broader range of applications without requiring application tuning or system tuning. This enhancement applies large pages automatically for anonymous memory that is based on segment sizes.

Large Pages for Kernel Memory

This system performance enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 6/05 release.

For 64-bit platforms, this feature supports mapping of the portion of the kernel heap with large pages. This feature increases performance of the system by reducing the number of Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB) misses and the number of map operations or unmap operations.

Kernel Page Relocation

This system performance enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 6/05 release.

In this release, system performance has been enhanced on the Sun Fire 15K, Sun Fire 20K, and Sun Fire 25K domains.

Enhancements for bge and xge Network Interfaces

This networking enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 6/05 release.

The Solaris OS now contains features that extend the configuration possibilities for the bge and xge network interfaces. System administrators can now group these interfaces into LACP-capable link aggregations. These aggregations can support large-scale high availability or database implementations. In addition, you can configure xge and bge interfaces into virtual local area networks (VLANs) to extend network capability.

The new dladm command has been added for configuring and administering bge and xge interfaces. For further information, refer to the dladm(1M) man page.

Source-Filtered Multicasting

This networking enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 6/05 release.

Enhancements have been made to the Multicast Listener Discovery (MLD) protocol, for IPv6, and the Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP), for IPv4. The Solaris implementation of these protocols has been enhanced to support MLDv2 and IGMPv3. These extensions provide support for source address filtering on multicast traffic. Also included is support for IETF-specified socket extensions. This support enables applications to take advantage of source-filtered multicasting.

For further information, see the Programming Interfaces Guide and the System Administration Guide: IP Services.

Automatic Renewal of Kerberos Credentials

This security enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 6/05 release.

A new option has been added to the /etc/warn.conf file. This option enables the ktkt_warnd daemon to automatically renew credentials for users who are logged in. If the renew option is set, the users no longer need to run the kinit -R command in order to renew their credentials. In addition, options have been added to the /etc/warn.conf file that enable you to log the result when a renewal attempt is made.

See the warn.conf(4) man page for more information.

Enhancement to ikecert certlocal Command

This security enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 6/05 release.

The ikecert certlocal command now has options to set the validity period for certificate requests and for self-signed certificates. For more information, see the ikecert(1M) man page.

Enhanced Output With the metaimport Command

This system administration enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 6/05 release.

The Solaris Volume Manager metaimport -r command has been enhanced. The command shows the creation time for a disk set. The command also provides an advisory message when a disk is found in more than one disk set. These changes assist system administrators in determining which disk set to import.

For more information, see the Solaris Volume Manager Administration Guide.

Support for SCSI Disks Larger Than 2 Terabytes

This system administration enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 6/05 release.

SCSI, Fibre Channel, and iSCSI disks that are larger than 2 terabytes are now supported on 64–bit platforms. The format utility can be used to label, configure, and partition these larger disks.

For more information, see the System Administration Guide: Devices and File Systems.

Advanced DDI Interrupts

This developer tool enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 6/05 release.

The Solaris OS now provides a new DDI Interrupt framework for registering interrupts and deregistering interrupts. Support for Message Signalled Interrupts (MSIs) is also provided. New management interfaces enable you to manipulate priorities and capabilities, to interrupt masking, and to obtain pending information.

The framework includes the following new interfaces:

Note –

To take advantage of the features of the new framework, developers need to use the new interfaces. Avoid using the following interfaces, which are retained for compatibility only:

For more information, see “Interrupt Handlers” in the Writing Device Drivers manual. See also the individual man pages for the new interfaces. All man pages for these interfaces are in the 9F man page section.

Door Interface Revisions

This developer tool enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 6/05 release.

Two new functions, door_setparam and door_getparam, have been added to the doors interfaces. These functions enable door servers to set boundaries on the data size and on the number of descriptors that are passed to door_call on the door. These enhancements simplify the door's handler function.

The door_create interface has a new flag, DOOR_NO_CANCEL. This flag disables the cancellation process of the server thread when the client aborts a door_call function due to a signal. For door servers which do not take advantage of cancellation, this change can prevent unwanted EINTR returns from interrupted system calls.

For more information, see the door_setparam(3C) and door_create(3C) man pages.

Memory Placement Optimization Hierarchical Lgroup Support

This performance enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 6/05 release.

Hierarchical Lgroup Support (HLS) improves the Memory Placement Optimization (MPO) feature in the Solaris OS. HLS enables the Solaris OS to optimize performance for machines that have more than local memory and remote memory latencies. Machines with four or more Opteron CPUs might have local memory, remote memory, and further remote memory. On such machines, HLS enables the Solaris OS to distinguish between the degrees of remoteness. HLS enables the Solaris OS to allocate resources with the lowest possible latency for applications. The Solaris OS allocates local resources for a given application. And, if local resources are not available by default, the Solaris OS allocates the nearest remote resources.

The Programming Interfaces Guide explains the abstraction that is used by the Solaris OS to identify which resources are near each other for optimizing localization. The guide also describes the API that can be used for the locality group (lgroup) abstraction. For more information, see liblgrp(3LIB).

Support for Virtual USB Keyboard and Mouse Devices

This desktop enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 6/05 release.

This feature enables the Solaris OS to support multiple keyboards and mouse devices simultaneously. The virtualkm feature also provides an auto-switch function that enables users to obtain separate input for keyboards and for mouse devices. All these enhancements are compatible with existing applications.

This feature is particularly useful for the following users:

For more information, see virtualkm(7D).

X Client Support for XFree86 Extensions

These X11 windowing enhancements are new in the Solaris Express 6/05 release.

These enhancements take advantage of X server extensions that were originally developed by the XFree86 Project. These enhancements are now incorporated into the Xorg X server.

The new programs available include the following:

xgamma

Alters a monitor's gamma correction through XF86VidMode extension

xrandr

Resizes or rotates the screen through the RandR extension

xvidtune

Provides video mode tuner for Xorg through XF86VidMode extension

xvinfo

Prints X Video extension adapter information

Advanced users can use these applications to tune the settings of the Xorg server at runtime. This process provides more information about the capabilities of the current system hardware.

Note –

These programs require support for the XFree86 extensions. As such, these programs do not currently work with the Xsun X server. These programs do not work with other X servers that lack this support.

For more information, see the man pages for each application. Add /usr/X11/man to your $MANPATH, if needed, to view the man pages.

NVIDIA CK8-04 GE Driver Support

This driver support is new in the Solaris Express 6/05 release.

This release provides driver support for NVIDIA's gigabit Ethernet on the x86 platform. This features supports NVIDIA's Nfore4 chipset, CK8-04.

For further information, see the nge(7D) man page.

New Features in Solaris Express 4/05

This section describes all features that are new or have been enhanced in the Solaris Express 4/05 release.

TCP Keepalive Tunables

This networking enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 4/05 release.

With this enhancement, application developers can now fine tune the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) keepalive mechanism on a per-socket basis. The tcp(7P) man page explains in detail how to use this enhancement.

New Features in Solaris Express 3/05

This section describes all features that are new or have been enhanced in the Solaris Express 3/05 release.

Additional Banner Page Printing Option in Solaris Print Manager

This system administration tool is new in the Solaris Express 3/05 release.

Solaris Print Manager has been expanded to include an additional “Never Print Banner” option. Using this option ensures that banner pages are never printed for the specified print queue.

Previously, you only had two choices for printing banner pages in Solaris Print Manager:

The current printing options in the Print Manager reflect the lpadmin command options for printing to local print queues.

For further information about the Solaris Print Manager, see the System Administration Guide: Solaris Printing.

New Features in Solaris Express 2/05

This section describes all features that are new or have been enhanced in the Solaris Express 2/05 release.

Support for iSCSI Devices

This device management feature is new in the Solaris Express 2/05 release.

Support for Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) is provided in this release. iSCSI is an Internet Protocol (IP)-based storage networking standard for linking data storage subsystems. By carrying SCSI commands over IP networks, the iSCSI protocol enables you to mount disk devices, from across the network, onto your local system. On your local system, you can use the devices like block devices.

The iSCSI protocol does the following:

You can use the iscsiadm command to set up and manage your iSCSI devices. For more information, see the System Administration Guide: Devices and File Systems and the iscsiadm(1M) man page.

Fibre-Channel HBA Port Utility

This system administration feature is new in the Solaris Express 2/05 release.

fcinfo is a command-line interface that collects administrative information on fibre-channel host bus adapter (HBA) ports. This interface also collects data about any fibre-channel targets that might be connected to those ports in a Storage Area Network (SAN).

For further information, see the fcinfo(1M) man page.

Metaslot in the Cryptographic Framework

This security feature is new in the Solaris Express 2/05 release. This feature is of interest to both system administrators and software developers.

The metaslot is a component of the Solaris cryptographic framework library, libpkcs11.so. With metaslot software, an application that needs encryption can specify its cryptographic needs. With these specifications, the most suitable cryptographic mechanism that is available on the system will be supplied. The metaslot serves as a single virtual slot with the combined capabilities of all tokens and slots that have been installed in the framework. Effectively, the metaslot enables an application to connect transparently with any available cryptographic service through a single slot.

The metaslot is automatically enabled. The system administrator can explicitly disable the metaslot if preferred.

When an application requests a cryptographic service, the metaslot points to the most appropriate slot, which simplifies the process of selecting a slot. In some cases, a different slot might be required, in which case the application must perform a separate search explicitly.

Further information about the cryptographic framework is provided in the Solaris Security for Developers Guide. See also the System Administration Guide: Security Services.

IKE Enhancements

These security enhancements are new in the Solaris Express 2/05 release.

IKE is fully compliant with NAT-Traversal support as described in RFC 3947 and RFC 3948. IKE operations use the PKCS #11 library from the cryptographic framework, which improves performance. The cryptographic framework provides a softtoken keystore for applications that use the metaslot. When IKE uses the metaslot, you have the option of storing the keys on an attached board or in the softtoken keystore.

For further information about IKE, see the System Administration Guide: IP Services.

Xorg Release 6.8.2

This desktop enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 2/05 release.

The Xorg X server implementation has been upgraded from the 6.8.0 version to version 6.8.2 in this release. This upgrade fixes several bugs in the modules for various graphics cards. The upgrade also adds support for new graphics card models.

New and Updated Drivers

In the Solaris Express 2/05 release, the chxge driver supports the Chelsio 10G Ethernet controller card. This support is provided on 32–bit and 64–bit architectures for both x86 and SPARC platforms. This driver supports the DLPI interface and checksum offload.

For detailed information, see the chxge(7D) man page.

Key Features in Solaris Express

The Solaris Express releases introduce enhancements to the Solaris 10 OS. The Solaris 10 OS includes the following key features.

In the Solaris 10 OS, Sun Microsystems developed a new architecture for building and deploying systems and services that are capable of Predictive Self-Healing. Self-healing technology enables Sun systems and services to maximize availability. The Predictive Self-Healing feature includes significant changes to the booting and service administration processes. Also in the Solaris 10 OS, changes in the installation of the operating system provide a simplified and unified installation process.

The Solaris 10 OS introduces Solaris Zones software partitioning technology. Solaris Zones is a component of the Solaris Containers environment. Zones are used to virtualize operating system services. Zones provide an isolated and secure environment for running applications.

Other key features in the Solaris 10 software include the DTrace dynamic tracing facility, process rights management, and a new architecture for network stacks. DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing facility that gives Solaris users, administrators, and developers a new level of observability into the kernel and user processes. In the Solaris software, processes that previously required superuser capabilities now require process rights. Process rights management uses privileges to restrict processes to only those rights that are required to perform the task. Also of particular importance, the networking stack for TCP connections has been rearchitected to deliver extremely high performance while improving the scalability.

Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition 5 is another key technology. Also of particular significance, the Solaris 10 software introduces support for the 64–bit computing capabilities of the AMD Opteron processor. Finally, the Solaris 10 software introduces the Java Desktop System. This desktop system combines open source software with Sun innovation.

For a complete summary of all the new features that are new in the Solaris 10 release, see Solaris 10 What's New at http://docs.sun.com. For a summary of features that were introduced in the Solaris 9, Solaris 8, or Solaris 7 releases, see What's New in the Solaris 9 Operating Environment at http://docs.sun.com.