So the maintainer of our GNU emacs packages for #OracleSolaris was testing the upgrade to version 29, and asked me why every time he displayed emacs from a SPARC server to his x86 desktop, the X server crashed.
Thanks to the Center for Biotechnology (CeBiTec) at Bielefeld University in Germany for setting up and hosting these machines. The R740 is a donation from de.NBI Cloud Bielefeld, while the T8-1 is a permanent loan from Oracle Corporation.
Inspired by the equivalent features in the DNS resolvers in BSD & GNU libc, the #OracleSolaris 11.4.66 DNS client SMF configuration now accepts the "usevc" or "use-vc" options to make DNS queries default to TCP instead of UDP. See the resolv.conf(5) man page on an 11.4.66 system for more information.
In #OracleSolaris 11.4.66, the kldd utility, which shows the linker dependency chains for kernel modules, had some additions to help find the dependencies. We extended the -S option to accept a colon-separated path of directories, added the -P option to specify platform directories to search, and added support for finding dependencies specified via the deprecated _depends_on mechanism.
The packages for the cx_Oracle Python module have been marked obsolete and will be removed on upgrade to #OracleSolaris 11.4.66.
Maintainers of python code that use this API to access Oracle databases need to ensure their code is updated to use the replacement oracledb Python module instead, as provided in the Solaris package library/python/oracledb. See https://blogs.oracle.com/opal/post/open-source-python-thin-driver-for-oracle-database for more information on the differences and links to information on how to update Python code to use the new module.
The GCC 10 packages were also flagged for removal on upgrade to #OracleSolaris 11.4.66 (we already ship GCC versions 11, 12, & 13 to replace them).
Users of the gccgo compiler need to note that the removal of GCC 10 packages will also remove the libgo.so.16 library used by Go programs compiled with GCC 10, and that they thus will need to recompile any such programs with a newer version of gccgo before upgrading to SRU 66.
#OracleSolaris 11.4.63 adds a "DELEG" column to the output of 'zfs help -l properties' to show if the property is delegatable or not, as an easier alternative to searching for each #ZFS property in the zfs_allow(8) man page.
#ZFS retention has two new properties to offer new configuration choices in #OracleSolaris 11.4.63.
The new "retention.policy.onexpiry" property allows specifying what happens at the end of the retention period - automatic deletion, continued hold, or being left to allow manual deletion.
The new "retention.policy.changeacl" allows changing non-write permissions/ACLs on retained files, for sites who need to be able to change who can read the file during the retention period.
#OracleSolaris 11.4.63 has added support for setting the DNS "search" parameter via dhcp4, matching the existing support in dhcp6. The snoop command was also updated to decode dhcp4 option 119 to aid in troubleshooting.
The prstat command in #OracleSolaris 11.4.63 now takes "sys" and "usr" as arguments for the -s option to sort by just those components of the CPU usage, instead of the combined sys+usr CPU usage previous versions could sort by.
#OracleSolaris 11.4.63 offers a new optional "strict" mode for Live Memory Reconfiguration (Memory LZR) in Kernel Zones which treats the Memory LZR operation as successful only if the final memory configuration matches the requested one. This can be set in the capped-memory:memlzr property.
A new "nscfg adldap" subcommand was added in #OracleSolaris 11.4.63 to simplify the process of setting up a Solaris system to use an Active Directory server as the source of user information via LDAP.
System admins sometimes need to ensure that "long running" jobs
have completed before a reboot. To support this, #OracleSolaris 11.4.63 has added the ability for an authorized administrator to temporarily disable system reboot/halt by adding a new maintenance type to the existing 'sysadm maintain' subcommand.
Further information can be found in the updated versions of the halt(8), init(8), shutdown(8), and sysadm(8) man pages.
The packages network/legacy-remote-utilities and service/network/legacy-remote-utilities have been split in #OracleSolaris 11.4.63 to allow better control over which servers and clients are installed, and to allow sites to remove the insecure legacy BSD sockets software while retaining the ONC-RPC software.
These packages are no longer included in the system provided install groups, so sites that still need these will need to add them to the list of packages to install on fresh installations.
GCC 13 was added to the compiler packages available in #OracleSolaris 11.4.63, alongside GCC versions 7, 10, 11, & 12, and LLVM/clang 13.
GCC 10 is slated for removal soon, in an upcoming SRU. Users of the gccgo compiler need to note that the removal of GCC 10 will also include the removal of the libgo.so.16 library used by Go programs compiled with GCC 10, and that they thus will need to recompile any such programs with a newer version of gccgo before upgrading to the SRU that removes it.
#OracleSolaris admins planning out their maintenance windows for the next few months should check to see if they're using the OS bundled mysql-57 packages to run any databases. If so, you should plan on migrating them to use the OS bundled mysql-80 packages soon, as upstream support for MySQL 5.7 ended on October 25, 2023, and it is slated for removal in a future Solaris 11.4 SRU.