T5,M4 and Athena support in S10U11

The kernel patch for Solaris 10 update 11 show support for several new platforms: SPARC T5, SPARC M4 and the Fujitsu Athena (SPARC64-X).

7086173 Solaris support for SPARC M4 platforms
7086179 Solaris support for SPARC T5 platforms

7124696 Solaris support for Athena processor

7142242 Solaris support for Fujitsu's SPARC64-X Athena platforms

The Oracle SPARC T5 and M4 processors are unannounced when I write this but the T5 are expected early 2013.

getupdates.oracle.com/readme/147147-26

Solaris 10 1/13 released

The last update of Solaris 10 has now been released, update 11. The final name of the release is Solaris 10 1/13 and not 8/12 as plans earlier indicated. This is probably due to the upcoming SPARC T5 systems, to have the releases close in time. Supports the latest and greatest X86 systems, SPARC M-series, SPARC T4/T5 while still working fine on my 15 year old Ultra 2.

• Live Upgrade and Zone Preflight checkers 
• Install and boot from iSCSI 
• pkgdep command
• SSH, SCP, and SFTP Speed Improvements 
• USB 3 Support 
• Support for new hardware
• Enhanced FMA (AMD,Intel)
• Samba 3.6.8 with SMB2 support

Solaris 10 has full support for another five years and extended support until 2021.

Oracle Solaris 10 Downloads
Oracle Solaris 10 1/13 What's New

Solaris 10 10/12 and T5-8

Oracle keeps quiet about upcoming Solaris release and their features. I've however figured out the name (and planned release month) for the possibly last Solaris 10 update. It seems like s10u11 will be named Solaris 10 10/12 indicating a October release.

Not much is known about this release more than that it will probably feature a ZFS tech refresh, fully integrate OCM and live upgrade enhancements. It could possibly also support the new T5 processors since they might be quite similar to the current T4 processors except for the doubling of cores.

I have also seen fragments of information indicating that Oracle was running Solaris 11 Update 1 on SPARC T5-8 machines as early as March.