New Features in Solaris Express 11/05

This section describes all features that are new or have been enhanced in the Solaris Express 11/05 release.

Improvements to Volume Management (`vold`)

This volume management feature is new in the Solaris Express 11/05 release.

In this release, removable media management is improved. Previously, vold did not create device links for removable devices that contain no media. Now, device links are properly created for devices that contain no media, similar to the following:

lrwxrwxrwx  1 root  root     28 Jun 13 13:09 /vol/dev/aliases/cdrom0 
-> /vol/dev/rdsk/c2t2d0/nomedia

Now, you can use the cdrw command and the rmformat command to list devices that have no media when vold is running.

You can revert back to the previous vold behavior by changing the following support nomedia entry in the /etc/vold.conf file as follows:

support media

For more information, see the vold.conf(4) man page.

In addition, vold is now hot-plug aware. This improvement means that if you insert removable media, the media is automatically detected and mounted by vold. You do not need to restart vold manually to recognize and mount a file system from any removable media device.

For more information using these volume management improvements, see What’s New in Removable Media? in System Administration Guide: Devices and File Systems.

`vold` is Managed by the Service Management Facility (SMF)

This volume management feature is new in the Solaris Express 11/05 release.

The volume management daemon, vold, is now managed by the Service Management Facility (SMF). This means you can use the svcadm disable command to disable the following new volfs service, if appropriate:

# svcadm disable volfs

You can identify the status of the volfs service by using this command:

$ svcs volfs
STATE          STIME    FMRI
online         Sep_29   svc:/system/filesystem/volfs:default

For more information, see the smf(5), volfs(7FS), and vold(1M) man pages.

For more information about managing the volfs service, see What’s New in Removable Media? in System Administration Guide: Devices and File Systems.

UFS Utility Enhancements

This file system enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 11/05 release.

The UFS file system check utility, fsck, has been enhanced to include features from the FreeBSD 4.9 version of the fsck program, as well as other enhancements.

The fsck utility in this Solaris release includes the following improvements:

Checks and repairs file systems more thoroughly and provides improved error messages. For example, in some scenarios, fsck determines what structures are missing and replaces them appropriately.
Automatically searches for backup superblocks.
Reports when fsck needs to be rerun.
When clearing directories, fsck now attempts to recover directory contents immediately and therefore, reduces the time spent rerunning this utility.
If fsck finds duplicate blocks, and not all files that reference the duplicate blocks were cleared, fsck reports the inode numbers at the end of the fsck run. Then, you can use the find command to review the inodes that are damaged.
Improved error messages regarding the status of extended attributes and other special files, such as device files and ACL entries, are included.
Includes a -v option to enable more verbose messages.

In addition, the newfs and mkfs commands have been updated to include new options for displaying a file system's superblock information in text or dumping the superblock information in binary format.

newfs [ -S or -B ] /dev/rdsk/...

-S: Displays the file system's superblock in text
-B: Dumps the file system's superblock in binary

mkfs [ -o calcsb or -o calcbinsb ] /dev/rdsk/... size

-o calcsb: Displays the file system's superblock in text
-o calcbinsb: Dumps the file system's superblock in binary

The fsck utility uses this superblock information to search for backup superblocks.

For more information about these enhancements, see Chapter 17, Managing File Systems (Overview), in System Administration Guide: Devices and File Systems.

Internet Key Exchange (IKE) Enhancment

This security enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 11/05 release.

The ikecert utility now can copy keys and certificates that are on the disk to a hardware keystore device. The utility can also link existing key objects and certificate objects to the IKE database.

For more information, see the ikecert(1M) man page.

`cdrecord`, `readCD`, and `cdda2wav` Available

This device management feature is new in the Solaris Express 11/05 release.

Previously, cdrecord was available on companion CD. In this release, cdrecord is now available in the Solaris OS. cdrecord is a powerful tool for burning CDs. cdrecord supports more burners than cdrw does. cdrecord works better with USB and 1394 external burners. cdrecord is, however, limited to DVD images that are less than 2 Gbytes.

For further information, see the cdrecord, readCD, cdda2wav man pages in the /usr/share/man directory.

pilot-link Software

This Open Source software is new in the Solaris Express 11/05 release.

Pilot-link is a suite of tools that enables you to connect your Palm or PalmOS^® compatible handheld with Unix, Linux, and any other POSIX-compatible machine. pilot-link works with almost all PalmOS handhelds. To sync Palm devices with Solaris by USB port, pilot-link makes use of libusb. For further information, see the libusb(3LIB).

This release of pilot-link is based on pilot-link v0.12.0-pre4.

For further information, see http://www.pilot-link.org. See also pilot-xfer(1) in the /usr/sfw/man directory.