New release schedule for Solaris 11.4

I would like to draw your attention to a blog post by Joost Pronk van Hoogeveen: “Announcing a new simplified Support Repository Update (SRU) schedule for Oracle Solaris 11.4 and ZFS Storage Appliance software”.

Up to now, Solaris 11¹ had three SRU releases per quarter: one in the “Critical Patch Update (CPU)” timeframe containing mostly security fixes², one with all the new features², and one in between with regular bug fixes only. So a new SRU was released every 4 weeks.

In the future there will be two releases per quarter, one with the security fixes² and one with the new features². The cadence of new SRUs will be 6 weeks.

If you go from CPU to CPU³, nothing changes. There is one every quarter as before.

And the ZFS Storage Appliance Software (albeit under a diffent name) ↩
… and normal fixes ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Which is in many cases my practical recommendation for production systems. That said, i’m a big fan of “Patch early, Patch often”. ↩