Driver Enhancements

This section describes the driver enhancements in this release.

SR-IOV Support for igbvf and igb Drivers

The igbvf and igb drivers support the single root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV) specification on the Intel i350 Gigabit Network Controller.

SR-IOV Support for the ixgbevf driver

The ixgbevf driver supports the SR-IOV specification on the Intel x540 10 Gigabit Network Controller.

sxge Driver Support

The Oracle Solaris 10 1/13 release supports the sxge Ethernet driver for Oracle's Sun Blade 6000 Virtualized 40 GbE network express module (NEM).

Oracle's Sun Blade 6000 Virtualized 40 GbE NEM is a multipurpose connectivity module for Sun Blade 6000 modular system from Oracle. The NEM provides network and storage connectivity between the blades in a Sun Blade 6000 modular system chassis and external devices. The NEM supports connection to external devices through 1 GbE pass-through port and 40 GbE small form-factor pluggable (SFP+) ports. The NEM also supports Oracle's Sun ASIC Dual 10 GbE network interface card (NIC) virtualization and Oracle's Sun Blade X6270 M3 server module.

USB 3.0 Support

The Oracle Solaris 10 1/13 release supports the USB 3.0 specification. A new USB host controller driver, xhci, is integrated in Oracle Solaris. Mass storage devices and the USB hub that support USB 3.0 can both work in the USB 3.0 mode when they are connected with eXtensible host controller interface (xHCI) ports. All the other legacy USB devices other than the USB audio and video devices continue to work when they are connected to xHCI ports.

The data transfer speed in USB 3.0 is three to five times faster than USB 2.0. On an x86 system, the maximum speed of USB 3.0 is 150 MBps during a read/write on a USB 3.0 mass storage device. On a SPARC system, the maximum speed is 50 MBps.

For more information, see the xhci(7D) and usba(7D) man pages.