Solaris 10 10/08 (aka Update 6) is Now Available

Sun managed to only just get Solaris 10 10/08 out in time to still call it the 10/08 release. It was released to the public yesterday and is available for download now.

So why do you want this release? Well for a lot of good reasons. I’m not going to list them all as the Solaris 10 10/08 release notes do that job, but instead I’ll highlight some of the features I think are great/useful/long coming:

• ZFS Root filesystems - see my HOWTO: Migrate a UFS Root Filesystem to ZFS post
• ZFS failmode property - wait, continue or panic in case of catastrophic pool failure. This is very useful for systems which use only a single SAN LUN for all ZFS storage. Now your system will only panic if you want it to.
• ZFS Hot-Plug support - hands-free disk auto-replacement
• ZFS GZIP compression - for those who need even better compression, but don’t mind the slight speed impact
• Zones Update on Attach - now you can update (can’t “down-date”) a zone to the OS patch/release of the host it’s being attached to. Can also use this to migrate between sun4u and sun4v archs.
• Ability to Set Default Router in Shared-IP Zone - this one has been demanded for a long time
• x86: New GRUB findroot Command - now you can ludelete the first boot env that holds GRUB

There are a lot more new things and a lot more enhancements too. As I said above, check the release notes for all the details and then get updating, using Live Upgrade naturally.