Whats new for release 7 of Solaris/x86?
The new release of Solaris/x86 (7.0) has more driver support, of course. MCA (PS/2) hardware support and X-window’s PEX & F3 font support is dropped. A stripped-down Veritas Volume Manager is bundled, more Java-based apps., updated sendmail 8.9 and bind 8.1, and man pages are in SGML format instead of nroff. A big change in Solaris 7 is its support for 64-bit virtual addresses on UltraSPARCs, in contrast to 2.6 which has only 64-bit file offsets. However, Solaris 7.0 does NOT support 64-bit virtual addresses on x86 (or on older SPARCs). Solaris/x86 7 should support Intel’s Extended Server Memory Architecture, with its 36-bit physical memory addresses (64 GBmemory), on Pentium Pro, Pentium II Xeon, and beyond. Full Intel 64-bit functionality will have to wait for Sun’s port of Solaris to Intel’s IA-64 (Merced/McKinley) chip.
The new release of Solaris/x86 (7.0) has more driver support, of course. MCA (PS/2) hardware support and X-window’s PEX & F3 font support is dropped. A stripped-down Veritas Volume Manager is bundled, more Java-based apps., updated sendmail 8.9 and bind 8.1, and man pages are in SGML format instead of nroff. A big change in Solaris 7 is its support for 64-bit virtual addresses on UltraSPARCs, in contrast to 2.6 which has only 64-bit file offsets. However, Solaris 7.0 does NOT support 64-bit virtual addresses on x86 (or on older SPARCs). Solaris/x86 7 should support Intel’s Extended Server Memory Architecture, with its 36-bit physical memory addresses (64 GBmemory), on Pentium Pro, Pentium II Xeon, and beyond. Full Intel 64-bit functionality will have to wait for Sun’s port of Solaris to Intel’s IA-64 (Merced) chip.
