DTrace GPL'ed

Looks like DTrace is under GPL now. It would be really great to see it on Linux.

Solaris 12 Public Beta

Ok, the title should really be Solaris 11.4 Public Beta. However Solaris 11.4 is essentially what Solaris 12 was supposed to be. See the announcement and What's New document.

Alan Coopersmith created an excellent page with all different blogs about new features in 11.4 beta.

Also, see some blogs about sepecific features.

reflink(3c) What is it? Why do I care? And how can I use it?
Application Sandboxing in Oracle Solaris 11.4
Protecting Sensitive Data in Oracle Solaris 11.4
Immutable Zones: SMF changes & Trusted Path services
Solaris Analytics
Getting Data Out of StatsStore
Where Did The 32-Bit Linkers Go?
Weak Filters: Dealing With libc Refactoring Over The Years
Goodbye (And Good Riddance) to -mt -and -D_REENTRANT
New CRT Objects. (Or: What Are CRT objects?)
Regular Expression and Glob Matching for Mapfiles
ld -ztype, and Kernel Modules That Know What They Are
ELF Section Compression
ELF Program Header Names
Core File Enhancements for elfdump
kldd: ldd Style Analysis For Solaris Kernel Modules
Default Memory Allocator Security Protections using Silicon Secured Memory (SSM ADI)
More adventures in Software FMA
Live Zone Reconfiguration for Dataset Resources
Migrating from IPF to Packet Filter in Solaris 11.4
What's in a uname ?

ZFS past & future by Mark Maybee

OpenZFS ZIL Internals

Very interesting presentation on how ZIL works and on latest improvements in OpenZFS, presented during OpenZFS Developer Summit 2017.

General Purpose Server OS

Is general purpos server OS dead in the next few years? It definitely seems that way.

Sudo and Solaris Privileges

Sudo on Solaris 10 and Solaris 11 allow to specify a privilege set a command will run with. This is very powerful if you want to be more specific in granting only required privileges for a given command, instead of allowing a command to run as root. Although Solaris has additional/different means to achieve the same, which in some cases is better than sudo, but the latter is what most users are familiar with.

For example, the 'fmadm faulty' command requires sys_admin privilege to run.

milek    ALL=()PRIVS="basic,sys_admin" NOPASSWD:/usr/sbin/fmadm faulty

This means that user milek can now run: sudo fmadm faulty
and the command will now work, but it won't run as root - it will execute as user milek with privileges set to basic,sys_admin, which is more secure than allowing the command to run as root.

Solaris Open Source bits move to GitHub

Alan Coopersmith blogged about migration of Open Source content available in Solaris from java.net to GitHub. This is definitely an improvement.

The new repositories on GitHub are:

• solaris-userland
• solaris-xorg
• solaris-ips

Ebbisland and Extremeparr

Although The Register and others were suggesting Solaris 11 might be affected, it seems not to be the case - according to Oracle Solaris 11 has never been affected be either of them.The Register clarified it as well.

Also if you have a support contract you should have been told this much quicker.

ps. if you have CDE installed on Solaris 10 then there is an IDR available for extremeparr local exploit (again, Solaris 11 is not affected)

Solaris is a dinosaur!

A friend of mine blogged about Eoraptor, Unaysaurus and T-Rex. A fun read about FreeBSD, Solaris, Linux and others.

Solaris 11 Continuous Delivery Model

Solaris 11 adopts Continuous Delivery model, which means instead of Solaris 12 there will be Solaris 11.4, 11.5, etc. This is generally a good thing - quicker adoption of new features as most software certified for Solaris 11 should stay certified for the new dot releases, etc. This is also similar to what Microsoft did with Windows.

Oracle also extended Solaris 11 support to 2031.

AI: Distro Constructor and a Custom Script

When building your own AI images with distro_const it is useful sometimes to add a custom script to modify the resulting image. This is easily achievable by adding a custom script to the xml manifest provided to distro_cons.

For example, to change the default password for user jack, add the following checkpoint to the xml file, just before pre-pkg-img-mode checkpoint. 

<!--
  Set password to user jack, should match root password
  (if hash contains slashed they need to be backslashed)
-->
      <checkpoint name="lock-jack-account"
         desc="Lock the jack account from login"
         mod_path="solaris_install/distro_const/checkpoints/custom_script"
         checkpoint_class="CustomScript">
         <args>/usr/bin/gsed -i -e 's/jack:.[^:]*:/jack:XXXXXX:/g' 
                             {PKG_IMAGE_PATH}/etc/shadow
         </args>
      </checkpoint>

Requiring both GSSAPI and OTP

Darren Moffat blogged about how to force both GSSAPI (or pubkey) and OTP on Solaris in OpenSSH. This works, although is not entirely obvious how to set it up at first.

Containers, Now and Then

Ben Rockwood's take on containers.

SPARC S7 and M7

SPARC S7

Oracle released new SPARC S7 CPU and SPARC S7-2 and S7-2L servers. This is really interesting SPARC CPU if you need low-end servers, the first one in many, many years which can compete with x86 both in performance and price. It has some unique features as well.

See launch video.

Various articles on S7:

TheNextPlatform
The Register
PCWorld
ComputerWorld

Also see some benchmarks already published:

SPECjbb2015
SPECjEnterprise2010
Database: S7 vs x86
Yahoo Cloud Serving Benchmark