I’m very happy to announce that today we are releasing a new version of Oracle Solaris 11.4 for free/open source developers and non-production personal use.
Today marks the first delivery of our “Common Build Environment” (CBE) releases for the Oracle Solaris 11.4.
To enable us to make new features and fixes available quicker and to more systems Oracle Solaris now uses a continuous delivery model of SRU/micro releases rather than much larger minor releases every few years.
The GA release of a major or minor was historically the release intended for non-production use for developement of free/open source software, testing, proof of concept deployments. With the switch to a continuous delivery model many new features that have been added to Oracle Solaris 11.4 are not available in a release with a non-production use license.
The SRUs also contain updates to the free and open source software that is included with Oracle Solaris. The source code repository with build instructions and patches for the open source software is available on our solaris-userland GitHub repository. Some of the Oracle Solaris patches enable free/open source software to take advantage of functionality delivered after the 11.4.0 release.
You can upgrade an existing Oracle Solaris 11.4.0 system to the CBE release today and get access to the new features released in SRU/micros since 11.4.0.
- How do I get the Oracle Solaris 11.4 CBE releases?
If you already have a system with Oracle Solaris 11.4.0 GA release installed (it has the pkg.oracle.com/solaris/release IPS publisher configured) then a simple pkg update is sufficient. Alternatively, if you have a local IPS repository, you can copy the CBE, and update from there.
[Update] Intial installation ISO images on the Oracle Solaris 11.4 downloads page are now available on the downloads page.
Documentation for Oracle Solaris 11.4 is available from docs.oracle.com and also on our oraclesolaris-contrib GitHub repository.
- Is the CBE build the same as an SRU?
The CBE build(s) are a similar to a beta, they are pre-release builds of a particular SRU. As such they will not contain all of the fixes that the resulting SRU contains. However like the SRU release they are accumulative and include the fixes in prior SRUs and CBEs upto that point in time.
- Can I use the CBE build in production?
The CBE builds from http://pkg.oracle.com/solaris/release repository are available under a non-production use license.
- How often will there be a CBE release?
It is our intention to periodically deliver CBE releases.
- Can I upgrade from a CBE release to an SRU?
Yes, you can develop on a CBE release and to move into production by purchasing an Oracle support contract. You can then upgrade from a CBE release to a later versioned SRU by, configuring the appropriate IPS repositories and, running pkg update.
- How can I tell the difference between a CBE release and a suported SRU?
The version number shown by uname -v doesn’t contain quite enough detail.
In the /etc/os-release file the VARIANT_ID field of a CBE build will be cbe.
For an SRU release the VARIANT_ID field will be sru.
The IPS version of the entire package also differ, eg:
CBE: 11.4-11.4.42.0.0.111.0
SRU: 11.4.11.4.42.0.1.113.1