New Features in Solaris Express 4/06

This section describes all features that are new or have been enhanced in the Solaris Express 4/06 release.

Common Agent Container

This system administration feature is new in the Solaris Express 4/06 release.

The Common Agent Container (CAC) is a stand-alone Java program that implements a container for Java management applications. CAC provides a management infrastructure designed for the management functionality based on Java Management Extensions (JMX^TM) and the Java Dynamic Management Kit (JDMK). The SUNCacaort package installs the CAC software in the /usr/lib/cacao directory. Typically, CAC is not visible to the user or administrator.

Two occasions when an administrator might need to interact with the container daemon are as follows:

When an application tries to use a network port that is reserved for the CAC
To regenerate the CAC certificate keys when a certificate store is compromised

For more information, see the Chapter 14, Troubleshooting Software Problems (Overview), in System Administration Guide: Advanced Administration.

Predictive Self-Healing for x64 Systems

This system administration feature is new in the Solaris Express 4/06 release.

Starting with this release, the Solaris OS includes a set of predictive self-healing features to automatically capture, diagnose, and respond to hardware errors detected on your system.

The Solaris Fault Manager now provides support for CPU and Memory errors detected on x64 systems, including:

AMD Athlon 64 and Opteron^TM CPU errors
Northbridge and Hypertransport links errors
DRAM correctable, uncorrectable, and ChipKill errors

The Solaris Fault Manager automatically diagnoses failures in x64 hardware. The Solaris Fault Manager also attempts to automatically offline or isolate a faulty CPU, cache, or DRAM memory region. Diagnostic messages are reported by the fmd daemon.

For more information about Fault Management in Solaris, see:

Predictive Self-Healing Support for SNMP Notification

This system administration feature is new in the Solaris Express 4/06 release.

Starting with this release, the Solaris OS includes a set of predictive self-healing features to automatically capture, diagnose, and respond to hardware errors detected on your system. The self-healing diagnosis results are reported to the syslogd service.

The Solaris Fault Manager, fmd, now enables you to do the following:

Publish diagnostic results through the Solaris System Management Agent (SMA), including SNMP traps
Search an SNMP MIB for fault management information about each machine

The Fault Management MIB is located at /etc/sma/snmp/mibs/SUN-FM-MIB.mib on the Solaris system.

For more information about configuring SNMP on Solaris, see:

fmd(1M) man page
syslogd(1M) man page
Solaris System Management Agent Administration Guide
http://www.sun.com/msg

Java DTrace API

This system administration feature is new in the Solaris Express 4/06 release.

The Java Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) API is an interface to the native DTrace library. This interface provides support to develop visualization tools written in Java. The Java DTrace API comes installed in /usr/share/lib/java/dtrace.jar. This API allows multiple consumers of DTrace data to run simultaneously within a single Virtual Machine for the Java platform (JVM^TM machine). Each consumer of the Java DTrace API listens for probe data and enables you to request consistent snapshots of aggregation data at any time.

For more information, see the Javadoc^TM API at /usr/share/lib/java/javadoc/dtrace/api/index.html.

`mkdtemp()` and `mkstemps()` Library Functions

The library functions mkdtemp() and mkstemps() have been added to Solaris Express 4/06. The mkdtemp() function enables creation of uniquely named directories. The mkstemps() function enables creation of uniquely named files with a specific suffix.

For more information, see the mkdtemp(3C) and mkstemps(3C) man pages.

Zone Migration in Solaris Containers Technology

This system administration feature is new in the Solaris Express 4/06 release.

This feature enables migration of non-global zones from one machine to another machine. The zonecfg and zoneadm commands have been modified to enable migration of non-global zones from one system to another. The migration procedure detaches a halted zone from its current location and attaches the zone to a new system.

The global zone on the target system must be running the following:

The same release of the OS as the original host
The same versions of OS packages and patches as the original host

The zone detach process creates the information necessary to attach the zone on a different system. The zone attach process verifies that the new machine has the correct configuration to host the zone.

Because there are a number of ways to make the zonepath available on the new host, the actual movement of the zonepath from one system to another is a manual process that is performed by the global administrator.

Note - When attached to the new system, the zone is in the installed state.

For more information on configuring privileges for zones and zone privilege restrictions, see

zonecfg(1M) man page
zoneadm(1M) man page
System Administration Guide: Virtualization Using the Solaris Operating System

Sun Java Web Console

In the Solaris Express 4/06 release, an enhancement has been made to the Sun Java Web Console feature that was introduced in the Solaris Express 10/04 release. See ZFS Web-Based Management

In this release, the Solaris ZFS web-based management tool is available in the Sun Java web console.

For more information, see the ZFS Administration Guide.

Support for PCI Express (PCIe)

This feature has been modified in the Solaris Express 4/06 release.

This Solaris release provides support for the PCI Express (PCIe) interconnect for both SPARC and x86 based systems.

PCIe is designed to connect peripheral devices to the following applications:

Desktop
Enterprise
Mobile
Communication
Embedded

The PCIe interconnect is an industry-standard, high-performance, serial I/O bus. For details on PCIe technology, go to http://www.pcisig.com.

The PCIe software provides the following features in this Solaris release:

Support for extended PCIe configuration space
Support for PCIe baseline error handling and MSI interrupts
Modified IEEE-1275 properties for PCIe devices
PCIe hotplug support (both native and ACPI-based) by enhancing the cfgadm_pci component of the cfgadm command
ATTN Button usage-based PCIe peripheral autoconfiguration

The following cfgadm example output displays the hotpluggable PCIe devices on an x86 system. Note that this display might differ from platform to platform. Check your hardware platform guide for the correct cfgadm syntax.

# cfgadm pci
Ap_Id                          Type         Receptacle   Occupant     Condition
pcie1                          unknown      empty        unconfigured unknown
pcie2                          unknown      empty        unconfigured unknown
pcie3                          unknown      empty        unconfigured unknown
pcie4                          ethernet/hp   connected    configured   ok
pcie5                          pci-pci/hp   connected    configured   ok
pcie6                          unknown      disconnected unconfigured unknown

The administrative model for hotplugging PCIe peripherals is the same as for PCI peripherals, which also use the cfgadm command.

For more information, see the cfgadm_pci(1M) man page and System Administration Guide: Devices and File Systems. Check your hardware platform guide to ensure that PCIe and PCIe hotplug support are provided on your system. In addition, carefully review the instructions for physically inserting or removing adapters on your system, and review the semantics of device auto-configuration, if applicable.

PostgreSQL for the Solaris OS

This additional software is new in the Solaris Express 4/06 release.

PostgreSQL is a relational database system provided in the open-source community. More than 15 years of active development and a proven architecture have earned PostgreSQL a reputation for reliability, data integrity, and accuracy.

For more information, see http://www.postgresql.org.

ZFS Persistent Offline

This system administration enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 4/06 release.

In this release, the zpool offline command offline a device persistently by default. You can use the -t option to offline a device temporarily.

For more information, see the zpool(1M) man page.

For more information about the ZFS file system, see ZFS Command Improvements and Changes.