Solaris 10 8/07 Release

The long awaited Solaris 10 8/07 release, a.k.a. Update 4 is now available, and ready to download. This release was postponed many times due to some concerns about better testing and validating advanced features such as the new Deferred-Activation Patching, or the support for the upcoming AMD quad-core next generation processor. Interestingly, this release re-introduce the Documentation DVD.

As always, you must consult the excellent What's New in the Solaris 10 8/07 Release web pages. The following points are those I prefer:

Last, it is interesting to mention that the release number corresponds to the build date of the release, not the general availability (GA)date. It is the case for the 8/07 release, made public at the beginning of September 2007. And it was the case in the past with the 11/06 release which was made publicly available at the beginning of December, although it was build during mid-November 2006:

# cat /etc/release
                       Solaris 10 11/06 s10s_u3wos_10 SPARC
           Copyright 2006 Sun Microsystems, Inc.  All Rights Reserved.
                        Use is subject to license terms.
                           Assembled 14 November 2006

# cat /etc/release
                       Solaris 10 8/07 s10x_u4wos_12b X86
           Copyright 2007 Sun Microsystems, Inc.  All Rights Reserved.
                        Use is subject to license terms.
                           Assembled 16 August 2007

Update #1: 2007-09-10

I just forgot to update the preferred list with this particular point: the lx Branded Zones: Solaris Containers for Linux Applications. Let me explain why in a next blog entry.

Update #2: 2007-09-11

Sadly, the impressive work currently being done in the OpenSolaris community (and already available with the Solaris Express Community Edition) on the performance on NFS with ZFS problem--particularly the boot time problem--is not yet back-ported to the official release tree, including the use of evolution from sharemgr(1m) plus in-kernel sharetab(4) facility. I hope for the next Update.