More Solaris 10 goodies!

The latest beta release of Solaris 10 via the Solaris Express program has a whole slew of fantastic additions. Dan Price has an excellent post summarizing the new stuff. Highlights for me include:

• Solaris gets the Java Desktop System. This means a modern GNOME 2.6 instead of the fugly, dated GNOME 2.0 that I feared would end up getting shipped. It also means Netscape 4.7X is finally gone and now we have Mozilla 1.7.X by default! I’m in shock I’m so happy! My general belief is that delivering the same look-n-feel of the JDS on top of Solaris or Linux is really great. It’s important enough that I may just look at JDS for our next desktop role-out at the GSC instead of SuSE 9.2.
• SMF - Service Management Facility. Basically, if you’ve gotten used to chkconfig on Red Hat or SuSE, you’re gonna love SMF. On its most simple level, it means no more manually linking startup scripts into /etc/rcX.d/, similar to chkconfig, but really it’s so much more. SMF brings automated service control, including restarts, parallelized system boot, and is the biggest bit of technology behind the marketing pitch of “Predictive Self Healing”. I played with it today porting a /etc/init.d style RC script for MySQL to SMF, and boy howdy SMF is a nice system. I like it. A lot.
• More x86 hardware support, in the form of performance optimizations (like automatic libc selection and using SYSENTER) and additional hardware detection / support. I’m glad to see an improved aac driver for the Adaptec 2200S RAID controllers, as we have a bunch of those cards in production in Linux servers. Overall, continued improvement on the hardware RAID card front will be important in the x86 space, as the PC BIOS doesn’t offer the level of flexibility that makes Solaris Volume Manager (DiskSuite) elegant and functional for boot disk mirroring on an Open Firmware Sparc box.
• pam_ldap gets some welcome improvement. Considering Solaris *pioneered* using LDAP for auth services on UNIX, it’s nice to see this revision bring some of the recent Linux LDAP goodness back into Solaris.
• SVM mirror resyncs are now checkpointed. Yay! It’s nice to know I can reboot a box part way through a volume resync and not loose the last 10 hours of rebuilding!
• IP forwarding is now off by default. About goddamned time.

I’m disapointed that ZFS isn’t ready for me to play with yet. Hopefully soon. So, read the release notes, download it and give it a try. Definitely the best Solaris 10 beta yet.