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You may think that this already there, but so far you was only able to set a single dataset (ZFS filesystem or ZFS emulated volume) into read-only. This PSARC case proposed such an mode-of-operation for the complete zpool. According to the documentation of this case, the following steps are done to reach the read-only-ness.

1). pool is loaded but transaction processing is disabled
2). all filesystems and zvols are mounted in read-only mode
3). any intent-log replays are deferred (any pending synchronous writes will be replayed once the pool is imported read-write)

Last night a really large putback found it's way into the codebase: It centers around the Fault Management Architecture of Solaris. A lot of new features found their way in Opensolaris. For example smtp-notify:

smtp-notify is a small, lightweight daemon that is fully managed by the Service Management Facility (SMF). It uses the interfaces delivered in libfmevent to subscribe to both software and FMA problem lifecycle events. Upon receipt of an event, it produces an email notification based on a set of notification preferences which are stored in the SMF service configuration repository.

or snmp-notify

snmp-notify will generate one of two types of SNMP traps, based on the event class. For FMA events (list.* events), snmp-notify will generate the existing sunFmProblemTrap trap as defined in /etc/net-snmp/snmp/mibs/SUN-FM-MIB.mib. For software events (swevent.*), snmp-notify will generate a sunSweventTrap trap as defined in /etc/net-snmp/snmp/mibs/SUN-SWEVENT-MIB.mib.

Furthermore there are lot of other changes, for example a way to configure the notifications in the SMF repository or the definition of FMA events for instance state transitions (eg. a service going online or offline or in maintainance state).

As SMF is running in each zone on it's own, the fmd (the fault management daemon) had to be enabled to run in non-global zones as well. This was introduced by PSARC 2010/225:

This RFE will enable fmd and associated SMF services in a non-global Solaris zone. The set of fmd plugins delivered into a zone will be restricted to those that are relevant - the hardware-oriented modules, particularly, will not be delivered in a non-global zone.

The first consumer of the fmd service in a non-global Solaris zone will be SMF; this will work with fmd to achieve snmp and email notifications of instance state transitions.

The Opensolaris SATA subsystem got TRIM support with this putback to the codebase. The TRIM command is really interesting for SSDs, as the operating system can tell the SSD which blocks aren't used by the filesystem any longer with this comment. This helps the internal garbage collection of the drives to work more efficiently at erasing blocks ahead of their usage. As erasing is really an costly operating with Flash-SSD, erasing the blocks before you need them speed up things a lot.

Habe heute vormittag die Mitteilung bekommen, das mein Vortrag auf der DOAG 2010 angenommen worden ist. Damit werde ich dort einen Vortrag zum Thema "Performance Analyse - oder: Was macht eigentlich mein Solaris?" halten. Die DOAG Konferenz 2010 findet von 16. bis 18. November 2010 in Nürnberg statt.

Bo Steven Zhou proposed an interesting feature for Solaris in the "PSARC 2010/296: Add tunable to control RMW for Flash Devices".

According to avherald.com there was an accident in Riyadh involving a Lufthansa Cargo MD11. Look like an hull loss ... especially when you look at the photos at the end of the article:

Captain and first officer received injuries and were taken to local hospitals. Fire fighters were able to extinguish the fire, that broke out in the center area of the aircraft, front and rear portion were visibly not consumed by the fire.

An interesting ARC case found it's way into the case log: Stephen Lawrence proposed the zonestat to the architecture review comitee.

This feature consists out of two components. The zonestatd and the zonestat command. Stephen writes about the zonestatd:

A new smf service svc:/system/zones-monitoring:default will execute a zones monitoring daemon. This daemon will implement monitoring the system configuration, managing extended accounting, and computing memory utilization on behalf of clients.

This zonestatd is queried by the zonestat command to deliver data about the resource utilization of zones.

# zonestat 5 1
    SUMMARY
                        -----CPU------------- ----PHYSICAL--- ----VIRTUAL----
                   ZONE USED %PART %CAP %SHRU USED  PCT  %CAP  USED  PCT %CAP
                [total] 9.74   30%    -     - 7576M  23%    - 11.6G  24%    -
               [system] 0.28  0.8%    -     - 6535M  19%    - 10.4G  21%    -
                 global 9.10   28%    -     -  272M 0.8%    -  366M 0.7%    -
              kodiak-ab 0.32  1.0%    -     -  256M 0.7%    -  265M 0.5%    -
             kodiak-rie 0.00  0.0%    -     - 22.7M 0.0%    - 49.4M 0.1%    -

Due to the implementation with a daemonized part, you can even tell the daemon to compute a report about the utilization in certain intervals:

# zonestat -p -r memory -q -R average,high 30s 24h 1h

Please read Stephens case document for for more information.

With the integration of "PSARC/2010/111 exclusive IP for s10c" the zone facility of Opensolaris got an interesting new feature. It's possible for quite a while now to create a branded Solaris 10 zone (a Solaris 10 zone in Opensolaris, not unlike to the Solaris 8 or 9 zones in Solaris 10). Now this Solaris 10 branded zones zones support exclusive IP like native zones:

This case adds exclusive IP stack support to Solaris 10 containers.The initial Solaris 10 container case only added support for the shared IP stack model (see PSARC/2009/253)

A new trailer for the upcoming Tron Legacy:

Lightcycles, Jeff Bridges, Thirteen ... what could go wrong ... okay ... Disney ... but i think i know where i am end of this year

The PSARC case 2010/280 is a really interesting one - NFS Instances:

The proposed changes are needed to support an NFS server in a non-global zone; however, the changes are not specific to NFS. They would also be used when enabling any file sharing protocol (ie. CIFS) server for non-global zones.

The implementation of this case in conjunction with some other changes would enable you to create an NFS server in a zone. That's interesting to create virtualized file servers for example.

David Warren died on July 19, 2010 that the age of 85. Why should you care? Well ... this guy created the flight data recoder, better known as "black box". This invention made aviation saver as post-crash analysis is easier with some additional data about the aircraft in the minutes before the crash, thus enabling the investigators to make better suggestions for the future.