Brief introduction to Solaris (OS)

The Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS) from Sun Microsystems has evolved steadily since the release of Solaris 2.0 in 1992. A combination of innovative features and newly designed implementations of core services have brought Solaris to the forefront as the industry's leading production operating system. Key areas of innovation and development include the following:

• Reliability. Development in fault and error detection, isolation and recovery, and service management combined with a strictly enforced rigorous set of standards for integrating new code into Solaris OS.

• Performance and scalability. Unsurpassed ability to run a wide variety of workloads on systems ranging from uniprocessor desktops and rack systems to high-end multiprocessor systems.

• Manageability. Tools and applications to handle the day-to-day administration and management of Solaris systems.

• Observability. Kernel features combined with user software to monitor and analyze the behavior and performance of applications and the Solaris kernel.

• Resource management. Management of available hardware resources to effectively meet performance requirements, enabling a variety of workloads to run within a Solaris system.

With the release of Solaris 10, the evolutionary progress of innovation in Solaris has taken a quantum leap. The new technology integrated into Solaris 10 in the areas of observability and debugging, reliability, performance, resource management, systems management, and software development sets new standards for operating systems technology. Throughout this book, the text and illustrations created to describe the core components of the Solaris 10 kernel are supplemented with examples of several of the tools and utilities integrated in Solaris 10. These examples not only demonstrate the use of the tool or utility, but also illustrate kernel behavior and the way in which it is observed.

In the remaining sections of this chapter, we describe the Solaris release model and summarize the key features of Solaris 8, 9, and 10. Finally, we take a broad look at the major subsystems as a warm-up to the detailed discussions that follow in the rest of the book.

1.1. Key Features of Solaris 10, Solaris 9, and Solaris 8

This section briefly summarizes the key features of the Solaris releases covered in this edition of Solaris™ Internals. It is not a complete or comprehensive list of every new feature. A detailed and complete listing of new features can be found in the What's New document, which is generated for each major Solaris release, as well as each update release. What's New documents are available publicly on http://docs.sun.com.

Remember, each release of Solaris is a proper superset of the previous release; thus, features found in Solaris 8 roll up into Solaris 9, and of course Solaris 10 incorporates features from Solaris 8 and 9. A feature initially introduced in an earlier release may be enhanced in a subsequent release. Examples here include UFS logging (introduced in Solaris 7, improved over time in Solaris 8 and Solaris 9), and Dynamic Intimate Shared Memory (DISM, introduced in Solaris 8 and improved in Solaris 9 and 10).

The notable exception to the inheritance rule is hardware support. Support for older hardware products may be dropped from a given Solaris release. For example, Solaris 10 does not support 32-bit SPARC processors or the UltraSPARC I processor (which was released in 1995). Solaris 10 is a 64-bit-only release for SPARC systems and will run on SPARC systems using UltraSPARC II, UltraSPARC III, and UltraSPARC IV processors, as well as on any new SPARC-based processors and products introduced from this point forward and through the life cycle of the release. Of course, 32-bit SPARC programs and applications are fully supported and work just fine on the 64-bit Solaris 10 kernel. Solaris 10 also supports systems based on 32-bit Intel x86 and 64-bit AMD Opteron technology.

Keywords: Key features