Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU30 Is The Biggest Update We've Seen In A While

Oracle continues maintaining Solaris 11.4 with monthly stable release updates but there still is no public sign of anything past 11.4 for this operating system that was once exciting during the Sun Microsystems days. But with this week's 11.4 SRU30 release, at least there are many package updates.

Oracle this past week released Solaris 11.4 Stable Release Update 30 in it being nearly three years already since Solaris 11.4 was introduced. There are a number of prominent package updates with Solaris 11.4 SRU30 including Python 3.9, Perl 5.32, GNU Debugger 10.1, LLVM Clang 11.0, OpenSSH 8.2, and many other package updates. Solaris 11.4 SRU30 also includes updating many of the GNOME desktop components against their 3.36/3.38 state. There are many other package updates that were also carried out in the name of security.

Beyond the plethora of updated packages with Solaris 11.4 SRU30, there has also been a bit of feature work. One addition with SRU30 worth mentioning is support for Intel User Mode Instruction Prevention -- UMIP is finally supported in the Solaris world. User-Mode Instruction Prevention is found on Intel CPUs since Cannon Lake and on the AMD side size Zen 2. UMIP prevents certain instructions from being executed when above ring level zero. UMIP aims to fend off escalation attacks and provide other security safeguards.

The long list of package updates and other changes out of Solaris 11.4 SRU30 can be found via the Oracle blog.