Solaris Archive

Writing Solaris Device Drivers in Java

Submitted by Ian Rogers 2006-10-20 Solaris 34 Comments

"We present an experimental implementation of the Java Virtual Machine that runs inside the kernel of the Solaris operating system. The implementation was done by porting an existing small, portable JVM, Squawk, into the Solaris kernel. Our first application of this system is to allow device drivers to be written in Java. A simple device driver was ported from C to Java. Characteristics of the Java device driver and our device driver interface are described."

NexentaOS GNU/OpenSolaris Alpha6 Released

Submitted by erast 2006-10-18 Solaris 14 Comments

The sixth development release of the OpenSolaris-based, desktop-oriented Nexenta OS has been released: "Nexenta OS Alpha 6 is now available. Release Highlights: Nexenta Zones - opens the possibility to create custom zones and pre-install with selected software; integrated BrandZ - allows running Linux userland; SVR4 packaging - to install native Solaris packages (missing drivers, etc.); OpenSolaris build 50, with numerous kernel fixes and features."

OpenSolaris for PowerPC

Submitted by gelosilente 2006-10-03 Solaris 6 Comments

"Sun Labs is pleased to announce the release to the OpenSolaris community of a long awaited update to the Solaris PowerPC code base. This source contribution provides the community with a functional Solaris PowerPC development environment on selected target platforms. This is a modest, but important step toward reaching the goal of developing the Solaris PowerPC port project to the point where it includes the latest source tree, provides a shell or single user prompt on the target platform, and has enhanced debugging, ie: KMDB."

Solaris 10 with Trusted Extensions Readied for 11/06 Update

Submitted by anonymous 2006-09-23 Solaris 12 Comments

"As part of its server and storage announcements last week, Sun Microsystems said that it finally would be delivering the Trusted Solaris Extensions to its Solaris 10 Unix platform. Trusted Extensions is an add-on to Solaris 10 that gives it beefed up security and makes the platform more attractive to defense contractors, financial services firms, and any other organization that is fervent about security."

Google Testing Sun’s OpenSolaris, Sources Say

Submitted by mdoverkil 2006-09-21 Solaris 69 Comments

"Google is experimenting with the open-source version of Sun's Solaris operating system as a possible long-term prelude to replacing its massive global network of Linux servers, according to sources. With dozens of data centers worldwide estimated to house hundreds of thousands of Intel servers supporting its flagship search engine, a Google move to OpenSolaris would be another of several recent votes of confidence for the platform."

A Look at Solaris 10 6/06

Guest post by Robert Escue 2006-09-20 Solaris 31 Comments

Sun Microsystems makes new releases of Solaris about every four to six months, in many cases all the new release contains is bug fixes and some changes in functionality. More often than not most releases go by without a great deal of fanfare. Just as Solaris 10 3/05 broke new ground with Zones, Dtrace and the Service Management Facility. Solaris 10 6/06 introduces ZFS or Zettabyte File System and the SATA framework and Xorg 6.9, which will be the primary focus of this review.

OpenSolaris BrandZ Integrated

Eugenia Loli 2006-09-13 Solaris 33 Comments

BrandZ, which, quoting from the OpenSolaris BrandZ Community webpage, is a framework that extends the Solaris Zones infrastructure to create Branded Zones, which are zones that contain non-native operating environments, integrated into the OpenSolaris mainline OpenSolaris mainline kernel last night.

Solaris on a Diet

Submitted by jamesd 2006-08-06 Solaris 20 Comments

Engineers at Sun are working on a 'small' version of Solaris 10. "I've got a modified Solaris miniroot with ZFS functionality which takes up about 60 MB (the compressed image, which GRUB uses, is less than 30MB). Solaris boots entirely into RAM. From poweron to full functionality, it takes about 45 seconds to boot on a very modest 1GHz Cyrix Mini ITX motherboard."

Belenix 0.4.4 Released

Thom Holwerda 2006-07-11 Solaris 1 Comment

Belenix 0.4.4 has been released. "This release marks one more important step for OpenSolaris LiveCD performance. After a couple of months of hacking and testing this release includes an enhancement to the HSFS filesystem module that improves CDROM access time by upto 30%. In addition a bunch of work is going around packaging so the next major release should be complete with packaging based on Pkgsrc." Get it at their download page.

How-to: Nexenta Zones

Submitted by erast 2006-07-06 Solaris 24 Comments

"OpenSolaris is not only powerful, but it is very innovative. Somebody smart figured that simplistic chroot or BSD jail concepts could be extended to the level where every single part of HW is virtualized. The Linux kernel also offers somewhat similar proposition called vserver, but we all know that until a proposition is not a part of main-line kernel tree it will never be a solution. Well, forget about Linux, we have OpenSolaris now and it truly opens new horizons for us to explore."

Solaris 10 To Get Xen Support by Mid-2007

Thom Holwerda 2006-06-28 Solaris No Comments

Sun Microsystems plans to deliver support for the Xen virtualization technology in Solaris 10 by the middle of 2007. Sun is preparing to release to OpenSolaris sometime in July a snapshot of code that will run on top of Xen and which provides Dom0 (Domain zero) support using Solaris Dom0, which supports 32-bit and 64-bit Linux and Solaris DomU's, said Tim Marsland, Sun's CTO of operating platforms, at a media briefing on virtualization at Sun's San Francisco offices June 27.

Solaris 10 6/06 Released

Submitted by dbprice 2006-06-26 Solaris 81 Comments

Sun today released Solaris 10 6/06, which provides a host of improvements; most notably, this is the first release to support ZFS. Download it from Sun's Solaris website. A short summary of the new features is also available. Other new features besides ZFS: UDP and TCP/IP improvements, PCI Express support on x86 (including hotplugging), predictive self healing for x64 systems, and much more.

NexentaOS Alpha 5 (Dapper Drake 6.06) Released

Submitted by erast 2006-06-15 Solaris 22 Comments

The Nexenta project, which builds a distribution combining the OpenSolaris kernel with applications from Ubuntu, has announced a new alpha release of NexentaOS: "This release provides a fully integrated Ubuntu Dapper Drake userland, OpenSolaris core (build #40), and contains overall 11800 packages. In addition, Alpha 5 contains: Sun's Java SE 5.0 Java Development Kit (via NexentaOS APT); live upgrade; and OpenOffice.org 2.0, natively compiled on Nexenta OS."

Looking Back at One Year of OpenSolaris

Submitted by george 2006-06-13 Solaris 17 Comments

Exactly one year ago, Sun Microsystems open sourced its flagship operating system Solaris. This article asks the question, where is the OpenSolaris project after one year of operation? It contains views from Sun itself as well as insights from an external contributor to the code.

Minimizing Memory Usage for Creating Application Subprocesses

Submitted by Tyr. 2006-05-31 Solaris 1 Comment

"This article explains how a Solaris OS application with large memory requirements can effectively create a subprocess without unduly running out of memory or creating a deadlock. It also explores a related issue of how application memory is committed in the Solaris OS as opposed to other operating systems such as Linux." Here's a related article on ZFS and Solaris Containers

Belenix 0.4.3a Released

Thom Holwerda 2006-05-24 Solaris 4 Comments

Belenix 0.4.3a has been released. "Another release of the LiveCD this month. The significant feature of this release is the inclusion of JDK 1.5 under the new Distributors License for Java as announced by Sun on May 16th in JavaOne. See the JDK Distros Project for more details."

Belenix 0.4.3 Released

Thom Holwerda 2006-05-13 Solaris 12 Comments

Belenix, a live CD based on OpenSolaris, has seen the release of version 0.4.3. The Belenix people say this release is major performance upgrade, and includes several fixes such as a new file sorting algorithm to process the DTrace output, some stuff regarding Xserver which leads to boottime being decreased by 20 seconds, various installer bugs, and much more. Rejoice. By the way, here is a chart comparing ZFS with Linux RAID/LVM options.

Solaris Containers Technology Architecture Guide

Submitted by jonsmirl 2006-05-10 Solaris 4 Comments

The Solaris Containers technology addresses this void by making it possible to create a number of private execution environments within a single instance of the Solaris OS. This paper provides suggestions for designing system configurations using powerful tools associated with Solaris Containers, guidelines for selecting features most appropriate for the user's needs, advice on troubleshooting, and a comprehensive consolidation planning example.

Why ZFS at Home?

Submitted by jamesd 2006-05-02 Solaris 27 Comments

While there is a lot of buzz about Apple using ZFS, Solaris express of course uses it, and soon Solaris regular will use it (as of Solaris update 2). Yet there are many people that say ZFS is great for servers but people don't need it at home. This blog entry seeks to clear up this falacy. ZFS is possibly more needed at home.

Solaris Express 4/06 Released

Submitted by ormandj 2006-04-28 Solaris 20 Comments

Solaris Express 4/06 has been released. You can click here to download this release. There have been some minor bugfixes and some relatively noteworthy additions in this release (including PostgreSQL and PCIe support). Sun has a nice, detailed list of new features for this release.