New Drivers

The following new drivers and driver enhancements have been added to the Solaris 10 7/07 HW release.

Reliable Datagram Sockets

Starting with this release, Reliable Datagram Sockets (RDS) is a new protocol family that enables a socket to send messages to multiple destinations reliably over the InfiniBand interconnect.

RDS is delivered through a new SUNWrds package. The SUNWrds package consists of the rds and rdsib drivers for the socket and transport interface respectively.

x86: ACPI Thermal Zone Monitor

The minimal ACPI thermal zone monitor pseudo driver for the Solaris OS handles thermal zone events from the ACPI. Thermal zone events are primarily critical temperature events. If the BIOS in a given system implements specific ACPI methods, this pseudo driver handles the thermal zone events.

x86: Adaptec aac Hardware Support

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/.

Enhanced USB EHCI Host Controller Driver

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 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.

SATA HBA Framework and Marvell Driver

Starting with this release, READ/WRITE FPDMA QUEUED commands are supported. There is a considerable performance enhancement when performing I/O operations using the Marvell driver under specific work load conditions. Other workloads benefit to a smaller degree. The Sun Branded Hitachi 250GB HDS7225SBSUN250G drives have considerably better performance with larger writes using this feature.

There is also significant performance enhancement under many workloads for drives that support this optional portion of the SATA specification.

Compact Flash Support

The Compact Flash (CF) support feature enables you to use a CF card as an ATA disk through a CF-ATA adapter. This feature helps you start your system from a CF card and store your data on a CF card easily.

For more information about Compact Flash supporting, see the ata(7D) man page.

ACM Driver of USB Communication Device Class

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

x86: SATA AHCI HBA Driver

The AHCI driver is a SATA framework-compliant HBA driver which 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-plug functions.

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

CardBus Support

The CardBus support feature adds 32-bit PC Card support in Solaris. Both 16-bit and 32-bit PC Cards are now recognized by Solaris. For more information, see the pcic(7D)pcic(7D) and cardbus(4) man pages.

IBM LTO-4 Tape Drive Support

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

HP LTO-4 Tape Drive Support

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

Xorg X11R7.2 Server and Drivers

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.

NVIDIA Accelerated Graphics Drivers

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.

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

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.