Solaris 11.next becomes Solaris 11.4, but new features aren’t set

Much of the world tunes out between Christmas and New Year, and The Register shuts down. But Oracle decided that was the perfect time to reveal a little more about the future of its Solaris operating system. The guts of its twin holiday season posts on the OS were that it plans to give the world Solaris 11.4 some time in 2018 …

[Dan 55]

Where's Oracle's Meltdown/Spectre press release?

Either there should be a press release saying a patch is coming out shortly or there should a press release saying how great Solaris/SPARC is because it's not affected.

Instead there's utter silence because they haven't a clue because they fired everyone. Allegedly.

[Hot Diggity]

Re: Where's Oracle's Meltdown/Spectre press release?

It's not just calculators, Please don't forget toasters...

"Howdy doodly do. How's it going? I'm Talkie, Talkie Toaster, your chirpy breakfast companion. Talkie's the name, toasting's the game. Anyone like any toast?"

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Where's Oracle's Meltdown/Spectre press release?

Yes, so let me take the opportunity to thank you and your Sun brothers and sisters for many years of kick-ass OS code and support in the years prior to the acquisition. So many smart ideas. Except possibly for NIS+ :)

You folk were the reason I got into IT, and the reason I stayed. Time marches on, and Solaris is dead, but rest assured, you did good work. So thank you, from one nerd to another.

[LordBonkerZ]

Re: Where's Oracle's Meltdown/Spectre press release?

Same story here man! :)

[LordBonkerZ]

Re: Where's Oracle's Meltdown/Spectre press release?

Same story here man!

[joeldillon]

Re: Where's Oracle's Meltdown/Spectre press release?

The T4 does out-of-order execution so chances are it is affected by Spectre. Previous SPARCs might be alright, though.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Where's Oracle's Meltdown/Spectre press release?

> Previous SPARCs might be alright, though.

Nope. Speculative execution and branch prediction were first available in UltraSPARC-II.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ksplice? (Or "Ksplicey-like thingy", if you prefer?)

Docker?

[Korev]

Solaris is a hipster OS, it had containers ("zones") long before Docker became famous

[Anonymous Coward]

Erlang has been updated

I was not even aware that Sol 11.x shipped with erlang.

[rfrost]

The next scheduled security update from Oracle is Jan 16th

Oracle's next security update on its product portfolio is slated for Jan 16th 2018. I expect you will see an announcement on SPECTRE and MELTDOWN wrt SPARC then.

Oracle are saying nothing until this date I expect.

Look at their website on this here:

https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/security/alerts-086861.html

On this website they say:

Critical Patch Updates:

Critical Patch Updates are collections of security fixes for Oracle products. They are available to customers with valid support contracts. They are released on the Tuesday closest to the 17th day of January, April, July and October. The next four dates are:

16 January 2018

17 April 2018

17 July 2018

16 October 2018

[trev101]

Move ZFS to Linux

Linux is the future and the sooner Oracle up streams ZFS file system to it, the better.

[MolesAreVermin]

Solaris.gone More Likely

Not only have Oracle fired lots of people who knew Solaris well but they seem to have replaced them with idiots who have no clue what Unix is all about.

A once stable consistent platform is a now a jumble of ill-thought out features, buggy code - what else has Oracle ever written - and changes that serve no purpose other than to remove backward compatibility.

The good news is that if Oracle continues like this and destroys Solaris at least they themselves will be bankrupt too.