From this blog post comes the news that Solaris will soon be adopting the OpenBSD “pf” firewall / packet filter in Solaris 11.3, and Oracle hopes to make it the default in Solaris 12. I think this is a good thing, as current IPF in Solaris is ancient, and is what “pf” was designed to replace originally in OpenBSD.

In this InfoWorld article, Java founder James Gosling rates Oracle’s handling of Sun’s technologies in the four years since the acquisition.

In short, Java gets a passing grade, while the treatment of the Solaris operating system fails miserably.

Oracle will soon be announcing that it’s discontinuing development of its Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, Sun Ray software and hardware, and Oracle Virtual Desktop Client product lines.

https://blogs.oracle.com/virtualization/entry/important_information_about_oracle_desktop

http://www.zdnet.com/oracle-to-halt-development-of-sun-virtualization-technologies-7000018028/

OpenSolaris.org shutting down 24 March 2013

http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Main/

If you need anything from OpenSolaris.org, now is the time to download and archive it.

This link purports to be a leaked internal memo to the Solaris Engineering team detailing Oracle’s plans for the Solaris operating system.

Some highlights:

Next release of Solaris will be Solaris 11 in 2011.

Solaris 11 Express binary release available later this year; with free Developer RTU and optional support plan

No more “OpenSolaris” distribution releases.

No more nightly source code drops. New features will be shown to the outside world in full yearly Solaris releases.

Source code to Solaris will be released under the CDDL *after* binary releases

CDDL will still be used; all new source will be CDDL-licensed

Committed to delivery of binary releases, APIs in source or binary form, open source code, technical documentation, and engineering of upstream contributions to common industry technologies

“All of Oracle’s efforts on binary distributions of Solaris technology will be focused on Solaris 11. We will not release any other binary distributions, such as nightly or bi-weekly builds of Solaris binaries, or an OpenSolaris 2010.05 or later distribution. We will determine a simple, cost-effective means of getting enterprise users of prior OpenSolaris binary releases to migrate to S11 Express.”

Personally, I think this is a good thing. It eliminates the confusion that had grown around “OpenSolaris”. Was it a binary operating system distribution? Was it the collected source code bundles that made up Solaris? Was it the source and/or binary blobs that could be installed over an existing Solaris installation to make an “OpenSolaris” install? And so forth.

The Illumos Project has launched. It aspires to be the community built and maintained version of Oracle’s OpenSolaris code.

Oracle has released an updated Solaris Roadmap with details on the future of Solaris and OpenSolaris.

Some excerpts:

Oracle will continue to make OpenSolaris available as open source and Oracle will continue to actively support and participate in the OpenSolaris community

Oracle is investing more in Solaris than Sun did prior to the acquisition, and will continue to contribute innovative technologies to OpenSolaris, as Oracle already does for many other open source projects

Solaris 10 Next update CY2010 (“Update 9”)

OpenSolaris Next update 1st half CY2010

Bordeaux for OpenSolaris: for running MS programs without full Windows OS

Fluendo DVD Player for OpenSolaris

Peter Tribble has some notes from the OpenSolaris Annual Meeting.

Oracle will continue to make OpenSolaris available as open source, and Oracle will continue to actively support and participate in the community.

Oracle will also continue to deliver OpenSolaris releases, including the upcoming OpenSolaris 2010.03 release.

Oracle is investing more in Solaris than Sun did prior to the acquisition, and will continue to contribute technologies to OpenSolaris, as Oracle already does for many other open source projects.

This Register article talks about ZFS getting data deduplication capabilities later this year.

Sun has released the latest version of the OpenSolaris operating system, version 2009.06. You can get it here.

This release incorporates the networking stack improvements brought by Sun’s Project Crossbow and finally adds SPARC system/processor support.

Sun has released an open-source standard for storage encryption key management.

You can download the Crypto KMS Agent Toolkit here.

Roland Mainz sent me a note that Ksh93-integration update1 has been “putback” into Solaris 11 build 106.

Screenshots can be found here and the main project page here.

This updates ksh93 in OpenSolaris to a newer version, and adds new utilities such as a shell script compiler.

Sine Nomine Associates has completed their port of OpenSolaris to IBM System Z mainframe computers.

System requirements:

* A z9-or-later System z processor
* z/VM 5.3 or later
* A Layer 2 VSWITCH on your z/VM system
* Approximately 4000 cylinders of 3390 DASD (plus another 3390-3 used during installation as temporary storage)
* APAR 64666 and corresponding PTF UM32414 to enable Diag 2A8 support for the virtual OSA

The project’s source code is freely available as well.

The New York Times has an article up with opinions on the future of Solaris in a Linux/Windows world.

For the past three years, Sun’s “OpenSolaris” has only been available as a set of files to be unpacked on top of an already-installed Solaris 10 system. The first official stand-alone OpenSolaris release, OpenSolaris 2008.05, is now available for download at http://www.opensolaris.com.

According to the OpenSolaris General FAQ, SPARC support is not in this release but is planned for later in 2008. A six-month release and update schedule is planned.

Sun also announced that OpenSolaris will be an operating system option on Amazon’s EC2 Elastic Compute Cloud.