What's new in Solaris 10 10/09 aka U8

On docs.sun.com you can already find the Solaris 10 10/09 Release and Installation Collection. This release brings some interesting features: The long awaited user and group quotas in ZFS, support of L2ARC, faster patching and parallel zone patching. Beside of this several other changes found their way into the newest Solaris release:

  • System Administration Enhancements
    • Two-Terabyte Disk Support for Installing and Booting the Solaris OS
    • pcitool Utility
    • ZFS Features and Changes
      • ZFS and Flash installation support
      • Setting ZFS user and group quotas
      • Using ZFS ACL pass through inheritance for execute permission
      • Using cache devices in your ZFS storage pool
      • ZFS property enhancements (like properties to control the behavior of the ARC and the L2ARC
      • ZFS log device recovery
      • ZFS ACL Sets
    • nss_ldap shadowAccount Support
    • Sun Validation Test Suite 7.0 Patch Set 6
  • Installation Enhancements
    • Turbo-Charging SVR4 Packaging
  • System Resources Enhancements
    • Zones Parallel Patching
    • PVIO Drivers in Solaris 10 Guest Domains
  • Device Management Enhancements
    • iSCSI Initiator SMF Service
    • LSI 6180 Controller Support in Solaris MPxIO
  • System Performance Enhancements
    • Callout Subsystem Scalability
  • Driver Enhancements
    • Driver for LSI MPT 2.0-Compliant SAS2.0 Controllers
    • x86: Broadcom NetXtreme II Gigabit Ethernet Driver
    • x86: Interrupt Remapping Support for Intel Vt-d
    • x86: SATA Tape Devices Supported by the AHCI Driver
    • Sun StorageTek 6Gb/s SAS PCIe RAID HBA Driver
    • Intel 82599 10Gb PCI Express Ethernet Controller
    • Intel 82598 10Gb PCI Express Ethernet Controller
  • Freeware Enhancements
    • NTP Version 4.2.5
    • PostgreSQL 8.1.17, 8.2.13, and 8.3.7
    • Samba 3.0.35


You will find more information about the changes in the “Solaris 10 10/09 What’s New” available at docs.sun.com as well.