Solaris 10 Update 7

Solaris 10 05/09 was has been released, which probably is the last release from an independent Sun.

Noteworthy changes are:

SSH with PKCS#11 support which means use hardware acceleration for SSH on UltraSPARC T2 and Sun Crypto Accelerator 6000.

Improved power management for Intel CPU (T-State, Power aware dispatcher and deep C-state)

Enhanced observability for intel CPU ( performance counters, Nahalem turbo mode)

Major iSCSI improvements and bug fixes.

IPSec improvements (SMF service, stronger algorithms)

Support for backing out patches with update on attach for zones.

Additional network drivers (NetXen 10, hyper GigE, Intel ICHI 10 and Hartwell)

And lots of bug fixes...

The complete document: Solaris 10 5/09 What's New

The end of the world, as we know it?

I guess you all heard by now that Oracle is buying Sun. I can only hope that Oracle will continue to invest in technologies such as OpenSolaris, VirtualBox, ZFS/OpenStorage and SPARC(R) Rock.

I'm not quite sure exactly what Oracle is after, but at least they can stop developing their own filesystem now that they have ZFS and Java is probably something Oracle would like to have more control over. It must also be convenient to get that little free database, they already have a quite complex licensing model, ready to be applied to another engine ;)

I guess it much better for Solaris than if IBM was the buyer, Oracle have had Solaris as their preferred platform for a long time and doesn't have any own hardware or Unix flavor. We have to hope that all the great minds of Sun stays with the ship and gets to continue their work.

At least some good news has come out of this:

"In our opinion, Sun Solaris is by far the best Unix operating system in the business. With the acquisition of Sun, we will be able to uniquely integrate Sun Solaris and the Oracle database." -Larry Ellison

Perhaps this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship?

Zones and Parallel Patching

Jeff Victor has a interesting entry on his blog regarding performance of zone patching with soon to be released parallel patching and SSDs compared to serial patching and spinning rust. It's nice to finally see a near time solution to this since it has been a problem for quite a while.

In short he was able to speed up the patching of 16 zones five times with SSDs and parallel patching and 3 times with HDDs and parallel patching: