Solaris 10 Nears with New Beta Release

Sun has issued a refreshed beta build of Solaris Express 10. Build 69, Beta 7 is an incremental update that reaches several milestones.

The bits flesh out Sun's Predicative Self-Healing initiative with the Service Management Facility, replace Gnome 2.0 with Sun's own Java Desktop Release 3, and bundle new tools to help debugging. A host of X86 platform specific enhancements are included, along with more security features, additional mass storage support for mass storage drives and USB keys, as well as various networking tweaks.

The four pillars of Solaris 10 are: superior value, stability, security, and performance. To meet it goals, the Solaris product team turned to N1 grid containers, a new "predictive" self healing framework, process rights management derived from Trusted Solaris, and a new bottleneck hunting technology dubbed dynamic trace.

N1 Grid containers are designed to reduce licensing costs by permitting a single system to be divided up into 4000 different partitions per copy of Solaris. The "partitions" are not traditional; they allocate system resources for both storage virtualization and processing similar to the way a mainframe balances processes. Sun claims savings over virtual machines since fewer licenses are needed for operating systems.

The downside is that if the operating system goes down, everything goes down. Therefore, Sun has cycled its resources toward fault management and developed an extensible "predictive" self-healing framework that probes the hardware and software environments on a machine basis. The system is designed to intervene when necessary.

Some examples provided by Sun include scenarios where Solaris will copy data from failing memory to another area of memory or determine the correct order in which to restart services.

Sun's self healing is divided into three separate layers: Kernel telemetry at the operating system level, a hardware monitoring engine, and a fault manager that rests between the two; ultimately forming a registry that keeps track of all open services and their dependencies.

How well this all works depends largely on developers whom must populate the framework. To usher its partners along, Sun is readying prefabricated engines to plug into its self healing architecture, ISV's must also integrate the software into the fault manager. Sun claims that it will continually release new engines each quarter.

For better performance, Sun offers a Dynamic Tracing is a tool that analyzes and diagnoses bottlenecks that stem from faulty applications or poor system design. Sun designed this feature to work in a production environment under normal conditions and. Although the feature is turned off by default, over 30,000 probes extend deep into the operating system. A special scripting language can be used to write complex diagnostic procedures.

Solaris 10 is more secure with process rights management and role-based authentication. Each task is assigned only the rights that it needs to perform, and superuser access is restricted.

A final release of Solaris 10 is slated for November 15. The latest beta release can be downloaded from Sun's Web site.