Solaris is an operating system that
belongs to the UNIX family of operating systems. It is now owned by
Oracle who bought it from its original developers Sun Microsystems in
January 2010. Consequently, it is now known as Oracle Solaris. Solaris
was the first operating systems to introduce popular features like
DTrace, ZFS and Time Slider. It is now developed for both SPARC-based
and x86-based machines. Solaris 10 was released in 2005, and after a
long wait of more than five years, Solaris 11 was released on November
15, 2010.
Solaris 10
Solaris 10 supports both AMD and Intel
x86-64 bit machines. Solaris 10 has Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) and Solaris
Containers. SMF (Service Management Facility) is included to replace
int.d scripts. It also includes NFSv4 Least privileged security model
for improved security. Support for sun4m and UltraSPARC I processor,
which was present in Solaris 9 has been removed from Solaris 10. Solaris
10 does not support EISA-based PC’s anymore. Solaris 10 adds Java
Desktop System which is based on GNOME. It includes GRUB as the boot
loader for x86 systems and iSCSI support. Initial updates of Solaris 10
added ZFS file system, Solaris Trusted Extensions and Logical domains.
Later updates added Active Directory support for Samba sever, Solaris
Containers for Linux and enhanced rcapd (Resource Capping Daemon).
Furthermore, Solaris 10 includes tests for speed such as SpeedTest and
PowerNow for Intel and AMD processors, respectively. In terms of power
management, Intel Nehalem processors are supported. Oracle Solaris Auto
registration is another novel feature added in Solaris 10.
Solaris 11
Solaris 11 is more commonly known as
Solaris 11 Express. Apart from having almost all the features of Solaris
10, Solaris 11 Express introduced several new features. One such main
feature is the addition of new packaging system called IPS (Image
Packaging System) for program installation, updates, and patching. Other
such features are Solaris 10 Containers, virtualization tools for
network and QoS (Quality of Service), and virtual consoles. Solaris 10
Containers feature can be used to wrap the existing Solaris 10
installation inside a Solaris 11 Express system. Solaris 11 Express
further introduced ZFS encryption. Although, Solaris 11 Express has an
updated version of GNOME, Xsun and CDE are no longer there.
What are the differences between Solaris 10 and Solaris 11?
Solaris 11 Express and Solaris 10 have
many differences partially due to the fact that there was a long gap of
more than five years between the two releases. Solaris 11 Express is the
first release to include ZFS encrypted datasets. Solaris 11 Express
provides a convenient way to install, update and patch programs in the
form of IPS, which was not present in Solaris 10. It is much easier to
upgrade to Solaris 11 from OpenSolaris too. Unlike in Solaris 10,
Solaris 11’s important commands are in /usr/bin. BSD commands, which
were present in Solaris 10, have been depreciated in Solaris 11 Express,
and their usage is discouraged as well.
