SPARC T5 and M5 systems released

Oracle have announced new systems based on the new T5 and M5 processors. The T5 has doubled the number of S3 cores from the T4 and increased the clock frequency to 3.6GHz.

The M5 processor is also based on the S3 core (rebranded M4) clocked at 3.6Ghz but is has 6 cores and 48MB L3$. The M systems supports up to 32 M5 processor so a fully configured systems will have 192 cores and 1536 strands (hardware threads). The M5-32 have 32TB of memory in a single system.

Old and existing processors for reference:
T3 16 cores @ 1.65GHz 6Mb L2$ 1-4 socket systems PCIe 2.0
T4 8 cores @ 3.0GHz 4MBL3$ 1-4 socket systems PCIe 2.0

New processors:
T5 16 cores @ 3.6GHz 8MB L3$1-8 socket systems PCIe 3.0
M5 6 cores @ 3.6Ghz 48MB L3$ 32 socket system PCIe 3.0

Oracle claims 2.3x performance gain compared to the T4 with increased single-thread performance.

 All new systems both T5 and M5 supports LDOM (Oracle VM for SPARC).

Did everyone read that the M5-32 Supports 32TB of memory? No wounder they had to rewrite the virtual memory subsystem in Solaris 11.1

SPARC Servers

SPARC T5, M4 and SPARC64-X

Short summary of SPARC processor information that was disclosed at Oracle world, in the near future Oracle will release two different SPARC processors and Fujitsu will release a new SPARC64 processor with support for LDOM.

SPARC T5 (early next year)

• 16 Cores 128 threads 
• 28nm 
• 25% increased thread performance to T4 
• 2.5x throughput compared to T4 
• Scales from 1 to 8 processors 
• PCIe Gen 3 
• 8MB L3 cache
• LDOM virtualization (as with all previous T-series)
• Solaris 10 update 11 or Solaris 11.1

SPARC M4 (next year)

• 6 cores 48 threads 
• Scales to 32+ sockets 
• 48MB L2 cache 
• 28nm 
• 3.6GHz 
• 5-6x performance per socket compared to M-series 
• LDOM virtualization
• 32TB+ memory configurations
• Solaris 11 only (but S10 support in LDOM)

SPARC64-X

• LDOM virtualization 
• 16 cores 32 threads 
• 24MB L2 Cache 
• 3 GHz 
• On Chip  DB floating point 
• Crypto acceleration 
• Runs both S10 and S11 in lab

S11 and S10 inside LDOM 2.1 on T4

I've finally managed to get some time to play with live migration on a pair of SPARC T4-2. This post is not really adding any new information but is a walk-trough and initial reflections. I am going to continue to write LDOM instead of Oracle VM for SPARC Domains or something like that, even Oracle people still say LDOM and everyone else knows what is.

An interesting note is that I've used Solaris 10 as I/O and Control domain for the T4 servers while the LDOM is installed with Solaris 11 11/11. The disks for the LDOM are on LUNs over FC and MPxIO is used for multipathing from the I/O domain:

t42-01# dskinfo list-long
disk                                   size lun   use           p   spd type lb
c0t5000CBA015B85D98d0                  279G -     rpool         -   -   disk  y
c0t5000CBA015B93B90d0                  279G -     -             -   -   disk  y
c0t50002870000254901593534030832420d0  33G  0x0   -             4   4Gb fc    y
c0t50002870000254901593534030832420d0  33G  0x1   -             4   4Gb fc    y

Examples of migrating and reconfiguring the LDOM while running:

t42-01# ldm list
NAME             STATE      FLAGS   CONS    VCPU  MEMORY   UTIL  UPTIME
primary          active     -n-cv-  UART    16    16G      0.1%  12d 6h 37m
ldms11-01        active     -n----  5000    16    8G       0.0%  24m

t42-02# ldm list
NAME             STATE      FLAGS   CONS    VCPU  MEMORY   UTIL  UPTIME
primary          active     -n-cv-  UART    16    16G      0.1%  12d 1h 26m

ldms11-01:~$ uptime 
  5:11pm  up 19 min(s),  1 user,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.01
henrikj@ldms11-01:~$ prtconf -v |grep Mem
Memory size: 8192 Megabytes
henrikj@ldms11-01:~$ psrinfo | wc -l
      16

t42-02# ldm set-vcpu 96 ldms11-01
t42-02# ldm set-memory 200G ldms11-01

t42-02# ldm list
NAME             STATE      FLAGS   CONS    VCPU  MEMORY   UTIL  UPTIME
primary          active     -n-cv-  UART    16    16G      0.1%  12d 6h 50m
ldms11-01        active     -n----  5000    96    200G     0.1%  24m

ldms11-01:~$ prtconf -v |grep Mem
Memory size: 204800 Megabytes
ldms11-01:~$ psrinfo | wc -l
      96

When performing a live migration between the two hosts, running processes and open network connections are as expected intact, there is only a small delay in the network traffic visible. For my initial tests the delay was about 10 ms.

The live migration seems to work very well and the T4 seems to perform several times faster than the T2/T3 for general workloads. The only thing missing is that LDOM 2.1 is unable to dynamically reconfigure memory and CPU resources for a domain after migration. A reboot is then required, hopefully this will be fixed in the 3.0 release, which people at Oracle Open World said would be focused on removing current limitations (including migration between different types of sun4v processors).

LDOM supported by Oracle

Oracle VM for SPARC is finally supported by Oracle, you can now partition a system with with logical domains and license hardware available to the domain. This is something Oracle customers have been wanting for a while now and I must say I believed it would have been solved the day Oracle acquired Sun. Nevertheless it's now finally supported at the same time the first T4 systems are being delivered to customers, which must be considered good timing.

Server/Hardware Partitioning
Important change regarding OVM/SPARC and Licensing

First impressions of Solaris 11 11/11

I have had a few hours to try the final Solaris 11 release, overall I think it is far more stable and polished than the previous "Early Adaptors" release. Besides the fact that I am unable to use semi-old SPARC gear to test the release since only the latest generations of hardware are supported I have found few real problem so far.

The new packaging system finally fixes what I believe have been the biggest problem for Solaris the last five years or so, it is now repository based and it is simple to install software and dependencies are automatically solved. No more hassle of downloading and installing multiple software packages from SunFreeware to resolve dependencies. This also makes packaging faster and safer, brining the whole system to a known level and always with a safe recover option since it is used in conjunction with ZFS clones.

Zones are a fantastic tool for security/workload separation and virtualization so it's good to see that so many enhancements have been done in this area. The perhaps most noticeable is of corse that they now also use the new IPS system for packages and that makes a vanilla zones very lightweight without the hassle of a sparse zone. NFS service can now finally be provided from inside a zone. There is a tight integration with the new crossbow network virtualization making is possible to limit bandwidth to zones, use DHCP in a zone without having a separate NIC and build internal networks between zones inside a single Solaris 11 instance.

Imagine the power and flexibility of an T4-4 with 256 CPU threads and 1TB of memory running 50 zones with several high bandwidth/low latency networks inside the machine with no latency or overhead caused by virtualization.

Unfortunately the X86 version with the graphical desktop seems to be somewhat unstable compared to the Express release, I think it's related to the upgrade of the X server. I have been unable to use my laptop with to displays with the final release.

Solaris 11 is however focused on usage in servers and it seems stable for that, I have only found one disturbing problem so far, sharing ZFS filesystems does not seem to work ( zfs set -o sharenfs=on), but you can share each individual filesystem with the share command. Sadly if you are evaluating this you will probably have to wait until next year when there is a full release of Solaris since no updates are provided without a service contract. If you work for Oracle this is something you might want to fix for everyone, or tell me what I'm doing wrong.

Solaris 11 have many other new features such as per-user encryption of home directories with ZFS crypto, a new mirror/raidz hybrid bloc allocator for ZFS, numerous security enhancements among other thinks. I have only named a few of the changes I will probably keep posting Solaris 11 stuff as I find something interesting that is not directly highlighted it Oracle own what's new documents.

Update: As pointed out in the comments sharing of NFS together with ZFS works a bit differently now. If you share an existing dataset you have to set the share property. However if you set the sharenfs property when creating the dataset it works as in previous versions of Solaris 11 Express, OpenSolaris etc. Move information available in the documentation here.

Solaris 11 release and webcast

Solaris 11 will be release 2011/11/09 (2011/11/11 was not optimal for some reason).

Oracle will host a launch event in New York and you can register to attend to the live webcast.

Even if I have abandoned Solaris 11 for OpenIndiana for storage related installations, Solaris 11 have it's obvious place on bigger iron in the datacenter or for any mission critical workload that needs enterprise support. I would gladly have continued to use Solaris 11 for storage but the change made by Oracle to ditch the community and move to closed source and stricter licensing prevents that.

This will make fantastic features such as crossbow, IPS, Native CIFS and COMSTAR available for use in production environments. Many enhancements for zones have also been made, they can for example be NFS servers in Solaris 11.

Also if you want to make the most use of the new SPARC T4, Solaris 11 is the best choice since not every change usable to the T4 have been ported back to Solaris 10 8/11.

If you pay for support of Solaris 11, please demand that Oracle gives you access to the source, DTrace will loose it's value otherwise and I think Oracle needs to hear that.

Oracle Solaris 11 Launch webcast

SPARC presentations from OOW

The presentations from OOW are now online, two are very interesting from a SPARC perspective. One of them is a somewhat deeper technical review of the new SPARC T4. The second states that the next generation M-systems are currently being tested together with the 28nm 16-core T5 that testing should start this October and they have marked that processor as being delivered "early".

Since there should be few differences between a T4 and T5 besides the 28nm shrink, double the cores and possibly a frequency bump it seems like it could be possible squeeze the time to market for that design. (With few differences I mean that the core itself is ready)

Next Generation SPARC Processor, An In-Depth Technical Review
SPARC Strategy

A new dawn for SPARC

I think latest news and release surrounding SPARC changes the economy quite a bit. You will now get Virtualization with LDOM and Zones, Solaris and management with OpCenter included in your support contract.

This comes as the same time as the SPARC T4 is released with is suitable for a wide range of workloads contrary to the previous generations on T-series. The new T4 systems are also much cheeper compared to M-series with the same amount of compute power.

The included encryption also seems to be the fastest currently available in a common processor, so you can get the benefit of encrypting your filesystem/database/network with a very small performance penalty.

Compared to a few month ago the list of good news is quite impressive:

• SPARC T4 with 5x the single thread performance of SPARC T3
• 2-3x times faster encryption compared to T3 (which already was fast)
• Live migration of LDOMs
• OpCenter included in support contact
• Live migration between T2,T3 and T4 in the near future
• T4 supports 256GB memory per socket (1TB for the 5U T4-4)
• A engineered system is available, the SPARC SuperCluster
• Solaris 11 will be released shortly

Compared to other virtualization technologies Solaris Zones has no overhead and VM for SPARC (LDOM) have no overhead for CPU or memory. Some presentations at OOW claimed that zones had 4x less latency than KVM and 15x lower overhead compared to VMWare.

The next generation of T-processor is also being developed and should arrive next year. They will double the number of cores to 16 per CPU. A possible T5-4 would have 64 cores and 512 threads in one 5U enclosure.

I know there is a lot of talk about supporting the whole stack, but you will have one single vendor to blame for problems with the server, virtualization and management. Perhaps more importantly it will not cost more than the hardware itself and the support contract.

First days of OOW

A quick summary of he most interesting news from the first days of Oracle Open World that are related to Solaris/SPARC.

• Solaris 11 is slightly ahead of schedule, it was supposed to be released by the end of the year.

• OpCenter is now included in your support contract for no additional cost, including virtualization!

• A new Oracle VM for SPARC will be release (3.0) that supports live migration between processors with diffent clock frequency and even between T2 and T3.

• Future releases of Oracle VM for SPARC will try to remove limitations, for example enable live migration while using dedicated PCI hardware in guest domans.

• Some work on Solaris 12 have already been started

• Solaris 11 will have more focus on virtualization/cloud

• SPARC super cluster will support exadata instances (one per T4-4)

Now i'm of to a new session, a deep technical review of the SPARC T4.

The SPARC T4

Besides the new core and cache layout the SPARC T4 is very similar to the SPARC T3 in I/O and memory design. It also supports 16 DDR3 DIMMs with two controllers, built on 40nm technology, uses 6 * 9.6GB/s coherency links, Dual PCIe Gen2 interface and dual on-chip 10GbE interfaces.

The new S3 core is whats sets the SPARC T4 apart from previous T-processors. It has several features that greatly improves the performance compared to the T2/T3:

• Out-oforder execution
• Dual instruction issue
• Data/instruction prefetch
• Deeper pipeline
• MMU Page size up to 2GB
• Level 3 cache

"All of these characteristics in the SPARC T4 have yielded improvements in single-thread performance by 5X while retaining networking and throughput performance equal to that of previous multicore processors from Sun/Oracle."

The crypto graphic units (SPU, previously MAU) have also been moved into the pipeline so there is no longer any need to managed crypto units be individually. They provide high performance crypto acceleration for the supported algorithms:

"The SPU is designed to achieve wire-speed encryption and decryption on the processor’s 10 GbE ports. "

"These accelerators support 16 industry standard security ciphers and enable high speed encryption at rates 3 to 5 times that of competing processors."

The T4 has the ability to execute critical threads exclusively on a core. This is done by issuing a system call but it can also be handled from the command line by raising the thread priority to above 60. This means that existing applications can take advantage of this feature without rewrite. Applications that depend on a single high performance thread this thread can be declared as critical while other threads can take advantage of the highly threaded design of the T4 allowing great throughput while still providing the needed single-thread performance.

(I think what they should have been more specific in the first sentence by writing Oracle Solaris 10 and 11)
"Oracle 10 now and 11 (initial release) will have the ability to permit either a user or programmer to allow the Oracle Solaris Scheduler to recognize a 'critical thread' by means of raising its priority to 60 or above through the use of either the Command Line Interface or system calls to a function. If this is done, that thread will run by itself on a single core, garnering all resources of that core for itself. The one condition that would prevent this single thread from executing on a single core is when there are more runnable threads than available CPUs. This limit was put into place to prevent resource starvation to other threads. There will be further enhancements to Critical Thread Optimization done for Oracle Solaris 11 initial release)."

For many organization the high single thread performance of the T4 will enable the T-series to be used as a general platform for SPARC virtualization. Previously you could mix zones or dynamic domains on the M-series with LDOM on the T-series but there was not good solution for general workloads due to the weaker performance of the T2/T3 cores. Solaris zones are still useful tool for virtualization that has it advantages but the built-in virtualization in the T-series can provide better separation and live migration between hosts (which in turn can contain zones).

Besides the new processor the SPARC T4 systems comes pretty much the same chassis as the T3, they do however support the double amount of memory using 16GB DIMMs.

Oracle's SPARC T4-1, SPARC T4-2, SPARC T4-4, and SPARC T4-1B Server Architecture

Oracle announces SPARC T4 servers

Oracle have now announced the new line of servers based on the T4 processor. They come in three configuration ranging from 1 CPU/8cores with up to 256GB memory to 4 processors and up to 1TB of memory. There is also a blade version which has one processor and up to 256GB memory. The T4-1 and T4-2 processors are running at 2.85GHz and processors in the T4-4 are running at 3.0GHz.

Oracle claims a 5 times increase in single thread performance compared to previous T-processors while keeping the same high thread count and cryptographic acceleration. All the new systems support Oracle VM for SPARC, previously known as Logical domains (LDOMs). LDOMs will finally be an option for general workloads, and the supported version 2.1 also support live migration.

Supported Solaris releases are Solaris 10 8/11, Solaris 11 or Solaris 10 9/10,10/09 with 10 8/11 Patch Bundle.

SPARC T-Series
Oracle's SPARC T4-1, SPARC T4-2, SPARC T4-4, and SPARC T4-1B Server Architecture
SPARC T4 announcement

T4 focus in new S10 8/11 KUP

As expected Oracle is focusing on the yet to be released SPARC T4 processor in maintenance patches for Solaris 10 8/11. The recently released kernel patch has several changes specific for the new platform. All we need now is the hardware itself.

From patch 147440-02:

6994535: watchdog timeouts seen on small subset of T3/T4 systems
7014100: Solaris cpu-mondo queue filling up on T3/T4 systems
7040407: T4 should not advertise cspare hwcap
7045829: libc_psr memmove needs to avoid use of block init store for T4
7045836: memcpy on T4 could run substantially faster
7047568: perf counter changes for T4 1.2
7079983: T4 memcpy triggers compiler CR 7076485

Patch details 147440-02 - SunOS 5.10: Solaris kernel patch

Solaris 10 8/11 KUP

The first sustaining kernel patch for Solaris 10 8/11 (update 10) is now available: 147440-01. But Solaris 8/11 is yet to be released, they could be waiting until Oracle world for the release or they are having trouble with the release. The patch does not contain many changes but another interesting patch that requires the update 10 kernel patch was also just released:

147159-01: T4 crypto performance patch

7030953: AES CBC mode code path spends 50% time in non-encryption operations
7032670: AES-128-ECB 16KB encryption on T4 can be significantly better
7032698: AES-128-CFB128 16KB encryption (via ucrypto API) on T4 can be significantly better
7033814: assertion failure in OpenSSL speed RSA-4096 test via pkcs11 engine on T4
7036405: heavy mutex contention in libumem results in negative scaling of multi-threaded RSA test
7045416: PROFILE TRIGGER VALUE DROP-DOWN DOESN'T POPULATE FOR FIELDS BASED ON TABLES
7048794: 64-bit libsoftcrypto not enabled for T4
7069494: AGILE00205948:CAN'T DELETE STEP IN WORKFLOW EASILY

This is is the second proof that Solaris 10 will indeed support the new SPARC T4 processor.

Update: The final release of Solaris 10 8/11 have the the first sustaining kernel patch already installed (147440-01/147441-01).

IDG SPARC T4 article

A interesting article about the upcoming SPARC T4 is available from IDG but only with an subscription. The article is also available in text form on a Danish Oracle blog.

Excerpts from the article:
"The new T4 processor, running at 3GHz or more, has features that will also allow T4-based systems to take on some workloads that today are going to Intel Xeon processors, which today perform faster on single-thread workloads than do the T3- series of SPARC processors."

"At the Hot Chips 2011 conference, an IEEE technical conference held at Stanford University from August 17-19, 2011, Oracle systems engineers described the top features of the new T4 processors, including a 16-stage integer instruction pipeline and enhanced cryptographic performance. Among the business benefits associated with the new design will be: double the amount of per-thread throughput performance, compared to T3 – and a range of 2 to 7 times more single-thread performance for business workloads than T3 processors. Given the binary-compatibility of T3 and T4, this means that the same Oracle Solaris applications that have been running on T3 will see considerable speedup on T4, without recompilation."

Nyt om næste generation SPARC T-series
(Only a short introduction in Danish, article in English)

SPARC T4 information and Beta program

Oracle have announced an beta program för the upcoming SPARC T4 processor which Oracle perviously have disclosed should provide three to five times the single thread performance of current T3 systems.

"The aim here was to develop a processor core that would provide high-speed, single-thread performance while also addressing the needs of applications that benefit from the high efficiency and throughput of multithreaded cores. The SPARC T4 is up to five times faster than the SPARC T3 for single-threaded functions," says Rick Hetherington, vice president of hardware development at Oracle. "It's breakthrough technology for us."

This in combination with on-chip crypto acceleration, massive thread count and LDOM capability it looks like it will be the most interesting SPARC processor since the never released UltraSparc RK, Rock.

The new processor will also dedicate cores to critical software thread with a new Solaris API:
"The new systems use "critical thread API", or the ability of the Solaris operating system to recognize critical threads in applications and assign them, by themselves, to a single processor core. This allows the critical threads to run at the very highest performance levels without competing with other less critical threads. This delivers faster overall performance by accelerating the more critical components in threaded applications. "

Hopefully these advancements, at least in combination, will deliver broader on the T2/T3 promise of massive throughput without sacrificing or be limited by single thread performance. This would then make the T4 a very suitable general purpose processor with the advantages of handling massive amounts of load.

Be the First to Test Next-Gen SPARC Systems
Conversations with Oracle Innovators, Rick Hetherington
What's Inside the New SPARC T-Series Processors?
Oracle SPARC roadmap

LDOM 2.1 with Live migration

Oracle VM 2.1 (previously LDOM, Logical domains) was released yesterday, it finally has the ability to perform live migration of domains, much like VMWare vMotion. It is supported on T2 and T3 servers, it should also work on the T4 when it's released this fall (or at least an updated version).

From the press release:

• Live migration: Enables users to migrate an active domain to another host machine while maintaining application services to users. Live migrations are as simple as point and click using Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center’s console.
• Secure, encrypted migration included: On-chip cryptographic accelerators deliver secure, wire speed encryption capabilities for live migration – without any additional hardware investments.
• Dynamic Resource Management (DRM) between domains: Ensures that domains running the most important workloads get priority for CPU access over domains with less critical workloads.
• Increased maximum number of virtual networks per domain: Permits a dramatic increase in external access to domains.
• Lower-overhead, higher scalability networking for Oracle Solaris 11 Express: Allows virtual network devices to use shared memory to exchange network packets, enabling improved performance and scalability.
• Support for Virtual Device Service Validation: Immediately validates the name and path for a specified network device or virtual disk, greatly reducing the risk of incorrectly configured I/O.
• Integrated Dynamic Reconfiguration (DR) of Cryptographic units and virtual CPUs: Cryptographic units and CPUs are dynamically reconfigured together to simplify operations and ensure consistent performance.
• Enhanced Management Information Base (MIB): Enables the SNMP MIB to use the latest Logical Domains Manager XML interface, permitting third party management software to access the new features and resource properties.
• P2V tool enhancements: Bring more flexibility to quickly convert an existing SPARC server running Oracle Solaris 8, 9 or 10 into a virtualized Oracle Solaris image to run on SPARC T-series servers."

Oracle Announces Latest Version of Oracle VM Server for SPARC
Oracle VM Server for SPARC 2.1 Release Notes

In the year 2010

Another year have passed with lots of changes for Solaris users, some of them good but others quite bad. Most of them are of course related to the Oracle acquisition of Sun which completed January 2010.

The not so good things:

• OpenSolaris is dead
• We no longer have insight into the development of Solaris.next
• We no longer have access to the latest ON source.
• Oracle have lost many brilliant and well known engineers from Sun

Oracle is clearly focusing on Solaris but not in the open kind of way that we go used to with OpenSolaris. As I have written before, this will probably make lots of money for Oracle in the short run, but how can it grow the the Solaris customer base as the OpenSolaris model could?

On the bright side:

• Solaris 11 Express 2010.11, the pre-release of Solaris 11 due next year
• illumos, the community driven ON source gate
• Oracle begun to share some Solaris/SPARC roadmaps this fall
• SPARC T3, 16 cores with great throughput but with limited single thread performance

Solaris 11 Express is in reality a rebranded OpenSolaris 2011.11 release and has a huge amount of new features and enhancements compared to the last OpenSolaris release. The SPARC T3 is a good processor for highly threaded applications and we have seen roadmaps with a T4 coming next summer with three times faster single thread performance.

In 2010 the sparcv9 blog have had over 40 000 visitors counted as "unique" by statcounter. Happy new year everyone!

Two Solaris releases for the T4 in 2011?

Solaris 11 is not the only Solaris release we can expect to see in 2011. The next update of Solaris 10, update 10 or Oracle Solaris 10 8/11 which seems to be what Oracle are aiming for in both name and release date is also coming in 2011. Earlier posts have included some of the expected content but the name and release window recently surfaced.

I found this in a publicly available bug report:

                Oracle Solaris 10 8/11 s10x_u10wos_02 X86
Copyright(c) 2010, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
                    Assembled 22 November 2010
     Early Access Build for Evaluation and Test Purposes Only.
         NOT SUPPORTED FOR PRODUCTION USE.  Not patchable.

With the 8/11 target it seems that Oracle wants to release the update in time before Oracle World 2011, perhaps to have a new Solaris release to talk about in the sessions but it also seem likely that it will support the upcoming SPARC T4 (Yosemite Falls) processor that could be launched at the same time ( Oracles road maps have pointed to the second half of 2011 and Rick Hetherington stated in the recent interview that it was less than 12 month away ).

Another interesting thing is that in the Oracle roadmap, Solaris 11 was plotted at the same time as the SPARC T4, sometime in the second half of 2011. Could this mean both Solaris 11 and Solaris 10 8/11 will be released at the same time and at Oracle world 2011? Given all the announcement at last Oracle world it would make sense.

Take a look at the slides of John Fowler, Executive Vice President of Systems, page 8 for the roadmap.

This gives some more substance to Fowlers statement that they will continue to produce Solaris 10 updates for some time, the timeframe for the release was probably not very hard to guess but it is interesting that there now seems to be a preliminary name. It looks like next year will be an interesting year for both Solaris and SPARC.

Here is some information on some of the expected content of the update:
Solaris 10 update 10 update

More SPARC T4/T5 information

Oracle has made an interview with Rick Hetherington, Oracle vice president of hardware development available. There is quite a bit of information about the future and development of the SPARC processor, well worth a read.

"Going forward, the SPARC T4 is less than 12 months away. So that's pretty quick. And there's a reason behind that. We wanted to get more single thread performance into the SPARC T-series systems sooner rather than later. So we developed a new core for the SPARC T4 that brings together the combination of throughput performance through threading as well as really high-speed single thread performance. It's really breakthrough technology for us. Referring back to the timeline for development that we have, we developed that core and that technology back in 2006/2007 and we'll be delivering that to the market in 2011.

And then the SPARC T5 will have 16 cores as opposed to the eight cores that we have in the SPARC T4, in 28 nanometer technology. As we go forward with each of these new introductions we'll make sure that the interfaces that deal with memory are common and are contemporary with the sweet spot of memory technology."

Read the whole article here.

Solaris 10 update 10 update

Some additional details on the next Solaris 10 update have surfaced, they compliment the list in my previous post. No huge updates, Solaris 10 should not be seeing any ground breaking changes this late in its lifespan but good additions besides the bug fixes.

• IPfilter IPv6 NAT support
• 10Gb Ethernet support for Mellanox ConnectX-2 chipset
• SSH Support for ChrootDirectory and ConnectTimeout
• PSARC/2008/256 Native LDAP standalone tools (Duckwater Phase 0)
• Updated FireFox to 3.6.8+ and Thunderbird 3.1+

The ZFS update should include bits similar to snv_148 which among other things include the following:

• RAID-Z/mirror hybrid allocator
• Missing log import (PSARC/2010/292) (CR 6733267)
• ZIL synchronicity PSARC/2010/108
• read-only import (PSARC 2010/306)

There might also be an update to the bundled samba which is a bit overdue. This was delayed earlied due to change of licenses but that should now have been solved. This might slip again, as it did previously, but it looks like a 3.5+ version of samba will be included.

Update:

I should probably have mentioned that it seems that the name for the release will be Oracle Solaris 10 8/11 which means it is scheduled for a release around August/September 2011. This would be just one or two months before Oracle World so it seems highly likely it will support the expected SPARC T4. This new release cycle with one release per year seems like a better fit for enterprise customers, Solaris 10 9/10 is probably not in many datacenter yet.

Solaris 10 update 10