Chapter 1. Introduction

The Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS) from Sun Microsystems has evolved steadily since the release of Solaris 2.0 in 1992. A combination of innovative features and newly designed implementations of core services have brought Solaris to the forefront as the industry's leading production operating system. Key areas of innovation and development include the following:

• Reliability. Development in fault and error detection, isolation and recovery, and service management combined with a strictly enforced rigorous set of standards for integrating new code into Solaris OS.

• Performance and scalability. Unsurpassed ability to run a wide variety of workloads on systems ranging from uniprocessor desktops and rack systems to high-end multiprocessor systems.

• Manageability. Tools and applications to handle the day-to-day administration and management of Solaris systems.

• Observability. Kernel features combined with user software to monitor and analyze the behavior and performance of applications and the Solaris kernel.

• Resource management. Management of available hardware resources to effectively meet performance requirements, enabling a variety of workloads to run within a Solaris system.

With the release of Solaris 10, the evolutionary progress of innovation in Solaris has taken a quantum leap. The new technology integrated into Solaris 10 in the areas of observability and debugging, reliability, performance, resource management, systems management, and software development sets new standards for operating systems technology. Throughout this book, the text and illustrations created to describe the core components of the Solaris 10 kernel are supplemented with examples of several of the tools and utilities integrated in Solaris 10. These examples not only demonstrate the use of the tool or utility, but also illustrate kernel behavior and the way in which it is observed.

In the remaining sections of this chapter, we describe the Solaris release model and summarize the key features of Solaris 8, 9, and 10. Finally, we take a broad look at the major subsystems as a warm-up to the detailed discussions that follow in the rest of the book.