Oracle has introduced Solaris 11.4.81 CBE (Common Build Environment), a variant of the Solaris 11.4 operating system aimed at open-source developers and personal use. CBE simplifies access to current versions of software and updates for those who wish to use Solaris for free. This is the second release in the CBE series — the first was published in 2022. Unlike the primary Solaris 11.4 builds, which allow free use for testing, development, and personal projects, the CBE edition employs a continuous update model for new versions and resembles the Solaris 11.4 SRU (Support Repository Update).
The build includes new software versions, enhanced functionality, and bug fixes available at the time of the release formation. A separate ISO image has been prepared for download, and there's an option to switch to using CBE after installing the regular Oracle Solaris 11.4 builds. To switch to CBE, it's enough to connect the repository pkg.oracle.com/solaris/release in the IPS package manager and execute the command "pkg update." The source code for Solaris's open components is available in the GitHub repository, and individual packages can be downloaded from pkg.oracle.com.
The main changes compared to the previous CBE release:
- The desktop environment has been updated to GNOME 45 (previously, GNOME 3.38 was supplied). Cosmetic changes have been made to the interface, for example, the 'Activities' indicator on the desktop has been replaced with an indicator. virtual desktopsThe X server has been updated to the 1.20 branch. New versions of NVIDIA graphics drivers 470.182 have been added.
- The mDNS (Multicast DNS/Zeroconf) protocol implementation has been replaced with Avahi 0.8 package. Previously, a Solaris-specific port of Apple's Bonjour software was used.
- The system environment for the Python language is marked as self-managed (PEP 668), which prevents the use of pip and similar utilities for installing additional Python libraries in directories where the Python libraries included with Solaris are located. For installing additional Python packages in an environment separate from the system, it is recommended to use the pipx utility.
- Support for the preadv and pwritev system calls has been added for reading and writing data using multiple buffers. New functions added to libc include getpeereid, getumask, mremap, core_get_process_content, core_set_process_content, core_get_process_path, core_set_process_path, and ucred_getprinc. The value of IOV_MAX (the acceptable number of elements in the iovec array for a single call) has been increased from 16 to 1024.
- Support for Unicode 14 has been added in the functions u8_strcmp and u8_textprep_str.
- In lastlog, utmpx, and wtmpx, the Year 2038 issue has been resolved — the addressable time has been extended to the year 2106.
- The ability to define settings server SSH has been separated into individual files in /etc/ssh/sshd_config.d/*.conf. The OpenSSH package has been updated to version 9.6. Support for RSA signatures based on SHA-1 has been disabled. The scp utility has been switched to using SFTP.
- An option "-I" has been added to the ps utility for displaying time in ISO 8601 format.
- The modinfo utility has added support for separating the standard kernel modules provided in Solaris and separately installed modules. An option "-x" has been added to display only non-system modules.
- The core set now includes utilities ctfconvert, ctfdump, and ctfmerge for working with debugging data in CTF (Compact Type Format), which provides compact storage of information about C types, function relationships, and debug symbols. The ld linker has integrated support for CTF and added support for CTF version 3. The capabilities of the utilities elfcompress, ldiostat, and strip have been expanded.
- By default, the ACT (Autonomous Crash dump Tool) process is enabled, simplifying the analysis of kernel crashes. Additional paths have been added to the mdb debugger for searching kernel crash dumps. The diagnostic capabilities of the iostat utility have been enhanced.
- The cp and mv utilities have been updated to include the '-S' flag to flush buffers to disk using the fsync system call.
- The device /dev/full has been implemented, which returns zeros when read and an error code for lack of free space (ENOSPC) when written to.
- ZFS now supports file deletion protection for a specified duration (File Retention). The '.zfs/clone' directory has been utilized for mounting clones in clonedir mode in ZFS. The mount/unmount commands have been enhanced with the '-r' option to mount/unmount all filesystems within the specified mount point. The 'zfs send' command has introduced the '-w crypto' mode, allowing encrypted data to be transferred without decryption. Swap and dump partition settings have been moved from /etc/vfstab and /etc/dumpadm.conf to ZFS properties.
- A memory-reserve service has been added, allowing memory reservation for subsequent use in OSM (Object Storage Manager) during boot using the MRP (Memory Reservation Pool) mechanism.
- Support for live migration of isolated Kernel Zone (KZ) environments has been added. The zoneadm utility now includes a 'log' command to view the contents of logs related to a specific isolated zone.
- An Ansible package has been added for centralized configuration management.
- Developer program versions have been updated: GCC 14, LLVM 19, Go 1.23.5, JDK 1.8.0_441-b7, Node.js 20, Perl 5.38, PHP 8.4, Python 3.13, Ruby 3.13, Rust 1.78, autoconf 2.71, cmake 3.24, GNU make 4.4.1, meson 1.5.2, git 2.48.1, Mercurial 6.8, subversion 1.14.5, vim 9.1, GDB 15.1, ImageMagick 7, MySQL 8.4.
- Versions updated: GRUB 2.12, Shim 15.8, CUPS 2.4.11, OpenLDAP 2.6, Samba 4.21.3, Puppet 7.27.0.
- A package with the Unbound DNS server has been added.
- The set includes libraries zstd, pcaudiolib, bdw-gc, libadwaita, fmt, gcr-4, libpaper, libsoup-3, libuv, libyaml, espeak-ng, and libxcvt.
- Instead of Snort, the Suricata system is recommended for detecting and preventing network intrusions (Snort 3 utilizes LuaJIT, which does not support SPARC CPUs).
- The libraries gtk2, clutter, webkitgtk4, aalib, gtkmm, cogl, libtorrent have been removed.
- Versions of OpenSSL 1.0.2 and 1.1 have been removed, transitioning to OpenSSL 3.
Source: opennet.ru
