And a plan to have users of Sun hardware upgrade to get Solaris 11.4 and proper patches
Oracle will deliver “update releases” of Solaris every northern Summer, under a new plan it revealed this week along with news of the Solaris 11.4 beta and a hurry-along for users of old Sun hardware.
In a post detailing what Oracle calls “minor changes” to its release schedule, Big Red’s director of product management for Oracle Linux and Oracle Solaris Scott Lynn said the company’s new plans work as follows:
“This should make our releases more predictable, maintain the reliability you’ve come to depend on, and provide new features to you rapidly, allowing you to test them and deploy them faster,” Lynn said.
He also revealed that the beta for Solaris 11.4 has been “refreshed” with 280 bug fixes, several new features, mitigation for Spectre Variant 1.
But there’s also bad news: Solaris 11.4 won’t run on hardware released before 2011.
“Specifically, systems not supported in Oracle Solaris 11.4 include systems based on the SPARC T1, T2, and T3 processors or the SPARC64 VII+ and earlier based “Sun4u” systems such as the SPARC Enterprise M4000,” Lynn wrote.
“To allow customers time to migrate to newer hardware we intend to provide critical security fixes as necessary on top of the last SRU delivered for 11.3 for the following year.” But those updates “will not provide the same level of content as regular SRUs and are intended solely as a transition vehicle”, especially for those on newer hardware who have been “encouraged to update to Oracle Solaris 11.4 and subsequent Oracle Solaris 11 SRUs as soon as practical.” ®
Bootnote: The Register asked Oracle for a briefing about Solaris 11.4 on April 9th. As of April 19th we were told the company is considering our request. The blog post on which we’ve based this story was dated April 17th. Oracle did not direct us to the post. Just why is anyone’s guess.
Sponsored: Minds Mastering Machines – Call for papers now open
