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08 Jun 2018
Opera News
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09 Nov 2011
Planet filibeto
Alan Coopersmith: S11 X11: ye olde window system in today's new operating system
Today's the big release for Oracle Solaris 11, after 7 years of development. For me, the Solaris 11 release comes a little more than 11 years after I joined the X11 engineering team at what was then Sun, and finishes off some projects that were started all the way back then.
For instance, when I joined the X team, Sun was finishing off the removal of the old OpenWindows desktop, and we kept getting questions asking about the rest of the stuff being shipped in /usr/openwin, the directory that held both the OpenLook applications and the X Window System software. I wrote up an ARC case at the time to move the X software to /usr/X11, but there were various issues and higher priority work, so we didn't end up starting that move until near the end of the Solaris 10 development cycle several years later. Solaris 10 thus had a mix of the recently added Xorg server and related code delivered in /usr/X11, while most of the existing bits from Sun's proprietary fork of X11R6 were still in /usr/openwin.
During Solaris 11 development, we finished that move, and then jumped again, moving the programs directly into /usr/bin, following the general Solaris 11 strategy of using /usr/bin for most of the programs shipped with the OS, and using other directories, such as /usr/gnu/bin, /usr/xpg4/bin, /usr/sunos/bin, and /usr/ucb for conflicting alternate implementations of the programs shipped in /usr/bin, no longer as a way to segregate out various subsystems to allow the OS to better fit onto the 105Mb hard disks that shipped with Sun workstations back when /usr/openwin was created. However, if for some reason you wanted to build your own set of X binaries, you could put them in /usr/X11R7 (as I do for testing builds of the upstream git master repos), and then put that first in your $PATH, so nothing is really lost here.
The other major project that was started during Solaris 10 development and finished for Solaris 11 was replacing that old proprietary fork of X11R6, including the Xsun server, with the modernized, modularized, open source X11R7.* code base from the new X.Org, including the Xorg server. The final result, included in this Solaris 11 release, is based mostly on the X11R7.6 release, including recent additions such as the XCB API I blogged about last year, though we did include newer versions of modules that had upstream releases since the X11R7.6 katamari, such as Xorg server version 1.10.3.
That said, we do still apply some local patches, configuration options, and other changes, for things from just fitting into the Solaris man page style or adding support for Trusted Extensions labeled desktops. You can see all of those changes in our source repository, which is searchable and browsable via OpenGrok on src.opensolaris.org (or via hgweb on community mirrors such as openindiana.org) and available for anonymous hg cloning as well. That xnv-clone tree is now frozen, a permanent snapshot of the Solaris 11 sources, while we've created a new x-s11-update-clone tree for the Solaris 11 update releases now being developed to follow on from here.
Naturally, when your OS has 7 years between major release cycles, the hardware environment you run on greatly changes in the meantime as well, and as the layer that handles the graphics hardware, there have been changes due to that. Most of the SPARC graphics devices that were supported in Solaris 10 aren't any more, because the platforms they ran in are no longer supported - we still ship a couple SPARC drivers that are supported, the efb driver for the Sun XVR-50, XVR-100, and XVR-300 cards based on the ATI Radeon chipsets, and the astfb driver for the AST2100 remote Keyboard/Video/Mouse/Storage (rKVMS) chipset in the server ILOM devices. On the x86 side, the EOL of 32-bit platforms let us clear out a lot of the older x86 video device drivers for chipsets and cards you wouldn't find in x64 systems - of course, there's still many supported there, due to the wider variety of graphics hardware found in the x64 world, and even some recent updates, such as the addition of Kernel Mode Setting (KMS) support for Intel graphics up through the Sandy Bridge generation.
For those who followed the development as it happened, either via watching our open source code releases or using one of the many development builds and interim releases such as the various Solaris Express trains, much of this is old news to you. For those who didn't, or who want a refresher on the details, you can see last year's summary in my X11 changes in the 2010.11 release blog post. Once again, the detailed change logs for the X11 packages are available, though unfortunately, all the links in them to the bug reports are now broken, so browsing the hg history log is probably more informative.
Since that update, which covered up to the build 151 released as 2010.11, we've continued development and polishing to get this Solaris 11 release finished up. We added a couple more components, including the previously mentioned xcb libraries, the FreeGLUT library, and the Xdmx Distributed Multihead X server. We cleaned up documentation, including the addition of some docs for the Xserver DTrace provider in /usr/share/doc/Xserver/. The packaging was improved, clearing up errors and optimizing the builds to reduce unnecessary updates. A few old and rarely used components were dropped, including the rstart program for starting up X clients remotely (ssh X forwarding replaces this in a more secure fashion) and the xrx plugin for embedding X applications in a web browser page (which hasn't been kept up to date with the rapidly evolving browser environment). Because Solaris 11 only supports 64-bit systems, and most of the upstream X code was already 64-bit clean, the X servers and most of the X applications are now shipped as 64-bit builds, though the libraries of course are delivered in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions for binary compatibility with applications of each flavor. The Solaris auditing system can now record each attempt by a client to connect to the Xorg server and whether or not it succeeded, for sites which need that level of detail.
In total, we recorded 1512 change request id's during Solaris 11 development, from the time we forked the "Nevada" gate from the Solaris 10 release until the final code freeze for todays release - some were one line bug fixes, some were man page updates, some were minor RFE's and some were major projects, but in the end, the result is both very different (and hopefully much better) than what we started with, and yet, still contains the core X11 code base with 24 years of backwards compatibility in the core protocols and APIs.
09 Nov 2011 10:10pm GMT
Henrik Johansson: Solaris 11 released
Solaris 11 is available for download "SunOS Release 5.11 Version 11.0", based on build snv_175b.
There are of course many changes since Solaris 10, most of them have been available in the latest build of OpenSolaris but there are some new that are unique to the final release of Solaris 11.
Install images are available for download and works on all current SPARC machines which is the T and M-series. There are also images available for X86-based machines which also can be used in VirtualBox. Here is a quick reference for the brand new packaging system: IPS one liners.
I will post more detailed follow-up after I've had time to test it for more than a few hours.
Oracle Solaris 11 11/11 - What's new
Download Oracle Solaris 11
Future features of Solaris 11
09 Nov 2011 6:57pm GMT
Darren Moffat: Completely disabling root logins on Solaris 11
Since Solaris 8 it has been possible to make the root account a role. That means you can't login directly as root (except in single user mode) but have to login as an authorised user first and assume (via su) the root role. This still required the root account to have a valid and known password as it is needed for the su step and for single user access.
With Solaris 11 it is possible to go one step further and completely disable all need for a root password even for access in single user mode.
There are two complementary new features that make this possible. The first is the ability to change which password is used when authenticating to a role. A new per role property called roleauth was added, if it isn't present the prior behaviour of using the role account password is retained, if roleauth=user is set instead then the password of the user assuming the role is used.
The second feature was one that existed in the Solaris 11 Express release which changed how the sulogin command worked, prior releases all just asked for the root password. The sulogin program was changed to authenticate a specific user instead so now asks for a username and the password of that user. The user must be one authorised to enter single user mode by being granted the 'solaris.system.maintenance' authorisation - and obviously be one that can actually connect to the system console (which I recommend is protected by "other means" eg ILOM level accounts or central "terminal server")
The following sequence of commands takes root from being a normal root account (which depending on how you install Solaris 11 it maybe, or it might already be a role) and granting the user darrrenm the ability to assume the root role and enter single user mode.
# usermod -K type=role root # usermod -R +root -A +solaris.system.maintenance darrenm # rolemod -K roleauth=user # passwd -N root
Note that some of the install methods for Solaris 11 will have created an initial user account that is granted the root role and has been given the "System Administrator" profile, in those cases only the last two steps are required as the equivalent of the first two will already have been done at install time for the initial non root user.
Note that we do not lock (-l) the root account but instead ensure it has no valid password (-N) this is because the root account does still have some cron jobs that we ideally want to run and if it was locked then the pam_unix_account.so.1 PAM module would prevent cron from running those jobs.
09 Nov 2011 6:38pm GMT