Recent Posts by Chris Beal

I love opensource software, I use it every day, but sometimes a component I need is either not present in or at the wrong version in Oracle Solaris. We often hear the same requests from our customers too. Please can I have version x.y of opensource software FOO on Oracle Solaris 11.4. Oracle Solaris depends heavily on opensource software and we try to keep them reasonably up to date, while being careful not to break anything. However we don't have every peice of opensource...

With the release of the October 2018 Solaris 10 Extended Support Recommended patch set, you can now run Solaris 10 in Oracle Cloud. I thought it would be good to document the main steps for getting an image you can run in OCI High level steps are Create a Solaris 10 image using Virtualbox and get it patched with the October 2018 patch set Unconfigure it and shut it down Upload it to the Oracle Cloud object storage Create a custom image from that object you've just uploaded Create a...

As mentioned on my blog about getting a Solaris 10 image running in OCI, here we discuss the steps to get the OCI tools installed on Oracle Linux, so you can do the image management of your Solaris 10 image. VirtualBox has already created a vmdk image for you which is a format natively understood by OCI. So on the host where I had VirtualBox installed I need to perform the following steps. $ sudo yum install gcc libffi-devel python-devel openssl-devel $ sudo easy_install pip It's...

One of my colleagues pointed out an improvement I could make to my previous blog post on using PF for NAT for zones. That is to create an etherstub on which to create the VNICs. That way nothing you do in the private network can impact the public network. I've update the blog, but it also realized that I really should say 11.4 now it's out behaves exactly the same way. So you should be able to upgrade from 11.3 to 11.4 and keep the same configuration.    

Those of you that have ever read my own blog (Ghost Busting) will know I've a long standing interest in trying to get the systems we all use and love to be easier to fix, and ideally tell you themselves what's wrong with them. Back in Oracle Solaris 11 we added the concept of Software Fault Management Architecture (SWFMA), with two types of event modelled as FMA defects. One was panic events, the other SMF service state transitions. This also allowed for notification of all...

You'll probably have seen by now yesterday we released Oracle Solaris 11.4 Public Beta. I've been working with colleagues to write some blogs about the things we're most excited about. You can download it from OTN to see what we're talking about. Head over to the main Oracle Solaris blog for details of how to get it, what we've been working on these last few years, and some interesting things you can try.

Oracle Solaris 11.4 Beta is now available. One of the most requested features may seem like a tiny thing, but could have a huge impact on your VM deployments, or if you happen to deal with very large files regularly (eg video files). Copying files is usually a case of telling the file system to read the blocks from disk, then telling them to write those same blocks to a different bit of the disk. reflink(3) allows you to tell the file system to simply create a new mapping to...

Yesterday I contributed to the Oracle Solaris blog with some information about DAX (SPARC Database Acceleration) observability. Please take a look http://blogs.oracle.com/solaris  

One of the very coolest things about Oracle SPARC is Oracle's ability to engineer the processor to do what the software really needs. This moves intensive processing from general purpose compute cores, to special purpose pipelines. As these are designed to do just a small number of things, they are simple, fast, and we can have a lot of them. Trouble is, how do you know they're really doing something.One of the most impressive of these is Database Analytics Acceleration...