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.