On January 30, 2018, we released the Oracle Solaris 11.4 Open Beta. It has been quite successful.

Today, we are announcing that we've refreshed the 11.4 Open Beta. This refresh includes new capabilities and additional bug fixes (over 280 of them) as we drive to the General Availability Release of Oracle Solaris 11.4.

Some new features in this release are:

ZFS Device Removal

ZFS Scheduled Scrub

SMB 3.1.1

Oracle Solaris Cluster Compliance checking

ssh-ldap-getpubkey

Also, the Oracle Solaris 11.4 Beta refresh includes the changes to mitigate CVE-2017-5753, otherwise known as Spectre Variant 1, for Firefox, the NVIDIA Graphics driver, and the Solaris Kernel (see MOS docs on SPARC and x86 for more information).

Additionally, new bundled software includes, gcc 7.3, libidn2, and qpdf 7.0.0, and more than 45 new bundled software versions.

Before I go further, I have to say:

The following is intended to outline our general product direction. It is intended for information purposes only, and may not be incorporated into any contract. It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described for Oracle’s products remains at the sole discretion of Oracle Corporation.

I want to take a few minutes to address some questions I've been getting that the upcoming release of Oracle Solaris 11.4 has sparked.

Oracle Solaris 11.4 runs on Oracle SPARC and x86 systems released since 2011, but not on certain older systems that had been supported in Solaris 11.3 and earlier. 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. 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. These updates will not provide the same level of content as regular SRUs and are intended solely as a transition vehicle. Customers using newer hardware are encouraged to update to Oracle Solaris 11.4 and subsequent Oracle Solaris 11 SRUs as soon as practical.

Another question I've been getting quite a bit is about the release frequency and strategy for Oracle Solaris 11.

After much discussion internally and externally, with you, our customers, about our current continuous delivery release strategy, we are going forward with our current strategy with some minor changes:

Oracle Solaris 11 update releases will be released every year in approximately the first quarter of our fiscal year (that's June, July, August for most people).

New features will be made available as they are ready to ship in whatever is the next available and appropriate delivery vehicle. This could be an SRU, CPU or a new release.

Oracle Solaris 11 update releases will contain the following content: All new features previously released in the SRUs between the releases Any new features that are ready at the time of release Free and Open Source Software updates (i.e. new versions of FOSS) End of Features and End of Life hardware.



​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.

Oracle Solaris 11.4 is secure, simple and cloud-ready and compatible with all your existing Oracle Solaris 11.3 and earlier applications.

Go give the latest beta a try. You can download it here.