Solaris 11 provided a rare opportunity to redesign and reengineer many components of the Solaris kernel.
Designed to efficiently scale to the largest available systems (currently 256 cores and 64 TB of memory per system on SPARC, a little less on x64), significant work was done to remove obsolete tuning concepts and ensure that the OS can handle the large datasets (both in-memory and on disk) which are now commonplace.
The continuing growth in virtualisation plays to Solaris’ strengths: with the built-in hypervisor in the multi-threaded multi-core SPARC T-series we can provide hardware partitions even within a single processor socket. Solaris also features support for Zones (somewhat similar to the BSD Jails concept) which provide soft partitioning and allow presentation of an environment which mimics earlier releases of Solaris. This allows software limited to running on those older releases to obtain some of the performance and observability benefits of the host operating system. Many years of development and support experience have given the Solaris engineering division an acute awareness that new features must include the capacity to observe them.
While we have extensive testing, benchmarking and workload simulation capabilities to help bring a new release to the market, building in toolsto help customers and support teams diagnose problems with their real-world usage are essential. The Solaris 11 release extended the work done with DTrace in Solaris 10, providing more probe points than ever before.