Future features of Solaris 11

There is not much available information on the ongoing development of Solaris 11. I have scanned the bug database and summarized the sparse information available. Much of the work remaining before a final Solaris 11 release is fixing bugs found in Solaris 11 Express and making the new packaging/install system fully production ready, but there will also be features added that are not available in the Express release. Here are a few of the more noticeable changes:

• Zones should be able to be NFS servers
  Solaris 11 will be able to share NFS filsystems from within a local zone.
• User names longer than 8 characters needed
  The Solaris kernel is already capable of user with names longer than 8 characters but userspace tools needs to be updated to support this.
• EOF 32-bit x86 kernel support
  The final release of Solaris 11 will only support 64-bit x86 processors, this is already the case for SPARC since Solaris 10.
• Xorg 1.9 integration
  The X Server will be updated from current 1.7 skipping version 1.8.

A list with bugid of other changes that have integrated or is about to become integrated including the above:

6981088 PSARC 2010/368 EOF 32-bit x86 kernel support
6983602 Xorg 1.9 integration [PSARC/2011/008]
6625651 Support flowadm from non global zone
7006556 need partitioning support for EFI system partition and BIOS boot partition
4109819 user names longer than 8 characters needed
6946425 reduced copy support to comstar iSCSI target
6982476 SCSI PassThrough in Solaris Local Zone
6714685 Intel Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX)
6802568 PCI-Express Framework support for SR-IOV
6944824 Intel e1000g NIC support for Leweisville (82579LM and 82579LF)
6828868 smbadm support to Display Server Service (SRVSVC)
6981644 Update bash to version 4.1
6394308 Multiple Connections / Session (MC/S) support for iscsi initiator
6946536 zvol support in non-global zones
6654408 Include FreeGLUT 2.4.0 in Nevada.
6957488 PSARC/2010/035 Support for GVRP (Dynamic VLAN)
6983112 Need a PAM module for mounting per user encrypted ZFS home directories
6516586 DMX support for Solaris x86 and SPARC [PSARC 2010/176]
6982811 64 bit Xvnc server and Tiger Vncviewer support
6940855 Zero-Copy for iSER