This future Solaris 10 and all of the enhancements previewed in the Solaris Express program will be available on both Sparc and X86 platforms.
With Solaris Express 11/03, the main new enhancement is a feature called DTrace, which is short for dynamic tracing facility.
Another change with Solaris Express 11/03 is that the registry database formats in Solaris 9 and Solaris 10 are different, so customers are being given a preview of this new format if they need to have a machine maintain compatibility on Solaris 9 and Solaris 10. New commands allow administrators to switch registry database formats between the two versions.
A month ago, with Solaris Express 10/03, Sun introduced a whole new TCP/IP stack, code-named Fire Engine, which was redesigned from the ground up to allow it to take advantage of new protocols like Gigabit Ethernet and to lay the groundwork for a more efficient support of future protocols like 10 Gigabit and 100 Gigabit Ethernet.
The new stack has a more efficient way of dealing with TCP/IP packets than the current stack in Solaris 9. The net effect is that the Fire Engine TCP/IP stack can boost the performance of applications by as much as 10%. The new stack can also bring multiple processors to bear on a single, intelligent NIC, and thereby give it a serious performance advantage over rival TCP/IP stacks in Unix or Linux.
Solaris Express 10/03 also includes the basic framework Sun will use to support InfiniBand system interconnections in future Sun servers and with future Solaris releases.
The Solaris Express previews are available for free for non-commercial users on Sun’s web site. Commercial customers have to pay $99 to participate, but they get the preview software and all sorts of detailed roadmaps, which make it worth the dough.
This article was based on material originally published by ComputerWire.
