Solaris updates in 2012

In the Solaris online forum last week there where refereces to another scheduled Solaris 10 update, update 11 (s10u11), schedule for release the second half of 2012.

There where no other information regarding the release but it's good to see that Solaris 10 will continue to be updated a while after Solaris 11 have been released.

The scheduled also included the expected Solaris 10 8/11 release and the Solaris 11 release which probably will be available at Oracle World 2011. There was also an update scheduled for Solaris 11 the first half of 2012.

Update: You can look at the roadmap here.

Joyent illumos tree

Joyent which builds their cloud service on zones and ZFS just announced a new repository with patches against illumos that provides new features and bug fixes:

"Some highlights of the illumos-joyent tree include:
* ZFS I/O fair-share scheduling for zones
* the Joyent brand, which can be used as a template for other non-SysVR4 or IPS zone brands
* Reintroduction of sparse zone images
* Crossbow vnics on demand for zones & non-unique vnic naming (unique per zone, not per system)
* svcs enhancements ( svcs -Z/-z for interrogating zone services, -L for outputting log files directly (no more ls /var/svc/log | grep... ))
* vfsstat and iostat tweaks and ziostat, iostat(1M) for ZFS I/O
* more per-zone IO kstats
* the zonemon utility for zone kernel state troubleshooting
* DTrace enhancements such as llquantize"

I'll guess many of these changes will find it's way into illumos in a near feature. The whole mail from John Sonnenschein can be read here.

Joyent have always been an interesting company and have recruited very talented people after Sun settled. Both Bryan Cantrill and Brendan Gregg are now employed by Joyent so I would not be surprised if they will become one of the larges contributors to illumos.

illumos-joyent at github