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Solaris 8 Operating Environment 10/01 Description and What's New

Solaris[tm] 8 Operating Environment 10/01
Description and What's New

Solaris 8 10/01 adds key new product features and customer requested enhancements to previous releases -- while continuing to maintain compatibility with previous releases of Solaris.


Key Features:
  • Energy Star: X11R6.4 standards have been enhanced with Frame Buffer Power Management (FBPM), an extension to the Display Power Management System (DPMS). This enhancement is added to fulfill the U.S. Government's Energy Star program requirements and only works on Energy Star-compliant hardware.
  • Large Memory Support: Enables even larger amounts of memory to be configured in high-end Sun Fire systems.
  • PPPoE Support: PPP-over-Ethernet (aka PPPoE) for high speed connections. Many cable and DSL connections are made using routers connected over ethernet. PPPoE will allow better use of these new connection modes.
  • Starfire (Enterprise 10000) Next Gen Dynamic Reconfiguration: Availability of new Dynamic Reconfiguration functionality through rcfgadm/showdevices SSP (System Service Processor) commands, and DR notifications to registered applications through RCM (Reconfiguration Coordination Manager.)
  • Sun Fire Server DR Enhancements: Sun Fire Server Dynamic Reconfiguration utilizes cfgadm for its user interface and cfgadm_sbd plugin library for command sequencing. Sun Fire Server DR also utilizes Solaris nodename interface and hot plug bus registration.
  • Network Booting Using PXE (Intel Platform): Network Booting using Pre-Boot Execution Environmet (PXE) Will implement network booting for Solaris Intel platforms using new BIOS services to access network resources.
  • Reconfiguration Coordination Manager (RCM) Enhancements: RCM now will not perform an OS quiesce during a DR operation on systems with SunCluster installed.
  • Reconfiguration Coordination Manager (RCM) Sun Cluster Support: SunCluster support preventing systems with Sun Cluster installed from performing as OS quiesce during a DR operation.
  • RSMAPI: New user-level API allows cluster-aware applications to directly access interconnect hardware bypassing the operating system.
  • Live Upgrade: New release of Live Upgrade software adds new features, support and higher quality. Solaris users can smoothly update software with minimum impact to their production environment.
  • Audio Tool Enhancement: The new audio mixer(7I) architecture delivered in Solaris 8 for the SPARC platform is now available on the Intel platform. This provides the first audio support enhancement to the Intel platform in several years. In addition, the audio mixer architecture has had many enhancements to significantly improve stability and robustness. The CDE audio tools have been enhanced. sdtaudiocontrol is more reliable. sdtaudio now displays the audio waveform correctly as well as displaying stereo waveforms for stereo signals.
  • USB Audio: Support for USB Audio devices that are USB Audio 1.0 compliant has been integrated for both SPARC and Intel platforms. Recommended devices are listed on http://www.sun.com/io. The USB Audio driver is based on the new audio mixer(7I) architecture.