Solaris 7 arrives Full 64-bit operating system kernel is complete By Jim Mauro

October  1998

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The change in version number from previous releases (the last release was Solaris 2.6) is designed to convey the maturity of the software. Solaris 7 represents the seventh major release of the Solaris operating environment, which has been shipping as a production release for six years.

In order to maintain consistency and portability with commands and utilities that use traditional methods for operating system version checking, the SunOS versioning continues to follow the release numbering that has been used since Sun first announced Solaris more than six years ago. SunOS 5.7 is the version of the operating system component of the Solaris 7 release.

Solaris 7 incorporates a complete 64-bit kernel, including 64-bit shared object libraries for the development and execution of 64-bit applications. Solaris 7 is also available with a 32-bit kernel for older hardware platforms that do not implement 64-bit processors, such as Sun's previous generation SuperSPARC processor. (UltraSPARC is a 64-bit processor.)

The Solaris 7 software CD contains both the 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems and shared object libraries. Both versions can be loaded on a 64-bit hardware platform, allowing for the booting of either kernel. Moreover, complete backward binary compatibility is maintained for all existing 32-bit applications on the 64-bit environment. 32-bit application code does not need to be recompiled to run on the 64-bit kernel. (Note: There are a couple exceptions to the binary compatibility rule which will be covered in the Inside Solaris column next month.)

Solaris 7 has received UNIX 98 branding. It is fully compliant with the UNIX 98 standard for 64-bit application interfaces.

The implementation of a 64-bit operating system substantially extends the scalability of Solaris 7-based hardware platforms. The kernel now supports process address spaces larger than four gigabytes, allowing for much larger data sets and working space in physical memory. Databases and enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications can cache more data in memory, which benefit both transaction-oriented applications and decision support systems. Scientific applications (e.g. CAD/CAM) can create larger models, arrays, and other data structures in memory. Network-oriented application services, such as Web and NFS servers, also benefit from the increase in system resources, such as file descriptors and network socket connections, that Solaris 7 offers.

Additional performance enhancements include a new version of the JDK (Java Development Kit) with a new Just-in-Time (JIT) compiler and a new version of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). Also, applications that do 64-bit integer arithmetic will run faster when compiled with new versions of Sun compilers for Solaris 7, as the compiled code will make more efficient use of the 64-bit hardware registers.

Reliability, availability, and serviceability features implemented in Solaris 7 include:

• Dynamic reconfiguration (DR): DR technology has been available on the Enterprise 10000 system since it began shipping more than a year and a half ago. Now this technology is available on Enterprise 3x00 through 6x00 systems, allowing system administrators to take an I/O board offline, or bring it online, without disrupting system availability. (DR support for CPU/memory boards on the E3x00 through E6x00 servers are expected in a future release of Solaris 7.)

• Integrated UFS logging: UFS file systems can be mounted with logging enabled. This logs updates to the file system before they are applied directly to the UFS blocks and prevents file system inconsistencies that previously would require file system checks (fsck) to correct. Consequently, boot time is significantly reduced. Performance is also enhanced for synchronous writes to the file system.

• System crash dump utility: Several enhancements to the crash dump facility in Solaris 7, including a new administrative command for dump management, improve system serviceability by capturing more dump data and allowing for the allocation of a dedicated dump partition.

• New commands: A traceroute facility determines the route of an IP packet to a given destination, and new pgrep(1) and pkill(1) commands improve process management.

Other performance enhancements include an improved implementation of the poll(2) system call (used extensively in all types of applications), allowing for more file descriptors to be polled more frequently. For TCP/IP, selective acknowledgement functionality has been added (RFC 2018), improving TCP performance for large data transfers over long connections.

Solaris is a multithreaded operating system; the kernel executes as threads on available hardware processors and the fine-grained multithreading of Solaris provides concurrency in many areas of the kernel, such as network and disk device drivers, or the memory management and process management code. A POSIX-compliant threads library allows for the development of applications that can take better advantage multiprocessor hardware platforms. 64-bit Solaris 7 increases the number of lightweight threads that can be created and executed on a system, improving application scalability.

The ease-of-use features added to Solaris 7 are:

• CDE administration tools: GUI tools based on the Common Desktop Environment include a new process manager, performance meter, and system information monitor
• CDE end user tools: A new file finder and customizable graphical front panel, workspace menu, and workspace manager
• Netscape 4.05 Web brower with e-mail and HTML editor capabilities
• Answerbook: Sun's online documentation is completely browser based and can be configured to run from any Web server.

Finally, Solaris 7 is truly a global operating environment, with expanded unicode support (Unicode 2.1 standard) enabling the development of multilingual applications. Native language support has been extended to 37 languages and 95 locales. Support for the new Euro currency symbol is also included.

In addition to Solaris 7, Sun will release three server extensions -- Easy Access Server 2.0, Enterprise Server 1.0, and ISP Server 2 for departmental, data center, and ISP customers, respectively.

Solaris 7 is set to ship next month and will start at $450 for the desktop version and $695 for the server version. Solaris Easy Access Server 2.0 is priced at $595. Solaris ISP Server 2, scheduled to ship in December, will cost $5,995. Solaris Enterprise Server is not expected until the first half of 1999.

Resources

• Solaris home page http://www.sun.com/solaris

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URL: http://www.sunworld.com/swol-10-1998/swol-10-solaris7.html
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