Solaris

At last, there's a new build of Solaris Express out, and it sports along with other features a newboot - the next x86 boot architecture. This means that my recent entry on Installing Solaris with PXE/DHCP might actually be useful for someone now ;)

For those of you really interested: Dan Price has once again covered all the new features which came in this Solaris Express build.

As always, you can download this Solaris Express build from this location.

Today I was going to spend some time writing up an example of adding a service to Solaris 10 and explain working with manifest by replacing the standard SSH-server which comes with Solaris 10 FCS with the latest build of OpenSSH - 4.1p1. But after I'd quickly looked into the /var/svc/manifest/network/ssh.xml file, I realised that I wouldn't write a really good example today. Things turned out to be much easier than I expected. To replace an SSH server, you simply have to change paths to ssh-keygen and sshd files in /lib/svc/method/sshd. That's the file used by the manifest ssh.xml.

pS: of course, you're going to have to download and compile OpenSSH before doing anything else.

I've just found out from the most recent entry in the blog of Sean McGrath that a public version of FileBench has been finally made available yesterday.

FileBench is a universal benchmark allowing you to emulate various models of stressing a filesystem. It is also a framework which deals with personalities - special configuration files - which provide emulation of rather complex applications from the point of their filesystem interaction. There are few such personalities - they emulate mail and web-server behaviour, oltp database, etc.

Nicky Veitch had an entry on FileBench for quite some time now, and if you need more info - there is a separate section on FileBench on the SolarisInternals website, right here.

Sources for FileBench 1.60 can be found on theFileBench project page at SourceForge.

As most of you already know, yesterday, June 14th, was the official opening day for the OpenSolaris project - or, to be correct - the day of opening access to yet again vast portion of OpenSolaris sources.

Right here you can see what's accessible now, and what still awaits being opened in the future.

I liked OpenSolairs source browser most of all - very simple and useful.

Bryan Cantrill has commented this event in his OpenSolaris Sewer Tour blog entry.

Wonderful news! Finally, we have an OpenGL driver for x86!
As Alan already said, NVidia has finally released an OpenGL driver. This driver will work only in Solaris 10 and newer Solaris releases. Everything works just fine, and just like Sean had mentioned, we've already tried it with Quake II! :)

Solaris x86 driver page on NVidia's website can be found here.