Notices by Alan Coopersmith (alanc@fosstodon.org), page 4

Today we've released #OracleSolaris 11.4.66, our quarterly feature update. The announcement is at https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris/post/announcing-oracle-solaris-114-sru66 and details on new features and other changes are at https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris/post/whats-new-in-oracle-solaris-114-sru-66

The GCC 10 packages were also flagged for removal on upgrade to #OracleSolaris 11.4.66 (we already ship GCC versions 11, 12, & 13 to replace them).

Users of the gccgo compiler need to note that the removal of GCC 10 packages will also remove the libgo.so.16 library used by Go programs compiled with GCC 10, and that they thus will need to recompile any such programs with a newer version of gccgo before upgrading to SRU 66.

@federicomena @xogium Sun’s contribution to GNOME accessibility was not just on the development side either, but in things like applying for & managing EU grant money, testing against US Sec 508 standards, and serving on the various accessibility standards committees to ensure the standards gave free desktops a chance to meet US & EU purchasing requirements.

@deirdres or like messing with pollsters by giving answers they find amusing.

I also released a new version of the venerable makedepend tool this weekend, and wrote this warning about its lack of support for C23's new pre-processor features:
https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-announce/2024-February/003458.html

C23 is almost officially here, so amongst this weekend's new X.Org module releases (https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-announce/2024-February/thread.html) I've included an update to xprop to make it build with "gcc -std=gnu2x", which no longer allows using "true" as a variable name:
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/app/xprop/-/commit/0d2837162ef0e54647485eee2ba4b88012fbb1b4

@unixben I do still have this GNOME hat from when Sun first announced it was bringing GNOME to Solaris…

@ssharwood technically it's not a separate team any more, but a subset of folks in the Solaris FOSS package maintainers team who take care of the GNOME & X11 packages for Solaris. Much smaller than the days when we were developing our own stuff and not just passing through third party packages.

A Sun old-timer posted this ancient relic for sale on Facebook - tempting to get a reprint done for the current Solaris desktop team:

Announcing that the new release of imake might be Y2038 safe on 32-bit platforms, though "we sincerely hope that no one will actually still be using imake 14 years from now." Already betting that someone still will be though, despite us telling them to move off since 2005.

https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-announce/2024-January/003440.html

Saw my first CVE-2024-XXXX assignments this week. I was not ready for that…

@Conan_Kudo @whot I believe the /usr/bin/X symlink predates both Xorg and XFree86 and goes back to the versions from the 80’s, before loadable modules, when you’d link to the Xserver with the right DDX for your workstation (Xsun, Xdec, Xhp, etc)

My personal contributions to this SRU cycle included the legacy network client/server package split mentioned above; the removals of aalib, Caribou, libxklavier, libmusicbrainz, libsass and sassc; fixing getpwnam(NULL) not to return an uninitialized pointer, and fixing gdm not to call getpwnam(NULL); an editing pass over the section 7 man pages; and making the killall(8) man page describe what the command actually does and to stop claiming that shutdown(8) calls it directly.

These FOSS packages were removed from the #OracleSolaris package repository in the 11.4.63 SRU:

aalib
Caribou
libxklavier
libmusicbrainz
libsass and sassc
wxWidgets 3.0
Python py
Python extras
pidgin, pidgin-otr, libotr and pidgin-gnome-keyring
gtkspell

New additions to the EOF list for future 11.4 SRU's are:

gnu-gs-fonts-std
gnu-gs-fonts-other
Python boto
Yasm

The full list can always be found at
https://www.oracle.com/solaris/technologies/end-of-feature-notices-solaris11.html

#ZFS retention has two new properties to offer new configuration choices in #OracleSolaris 11.4.63.

The new "retention.policy.onexpiry" property allows specifying what happens at the end of the retention period - automatic deletion, continued hold, or being left to allow manual deletion.

The new "retention.policy.changeacl" allows changing non-write permissions/ACLs on retained files, for sites who need to be able to change who can read the file during the retention period.

#OracleSolaris 11.4.63 adds a "DELEG" column to the output of 'zfs help -l properties' to show if the property is delegatable or not, as an easier alternative to searching for each #ZFS property in the zfs_allow(8) man page.

The 'sxadm status' command in #OracleSolaris 11.4.63 has added two new extensions that it reports on.

BTC_NO is reported for AMD CPUs that are not susceptible to the Branch Type Confusion vulnerability (CVE-2022-23825).

SMEP is reported for Intel & AMD CPUs which have enabled Supervisor Mode Execution Prevention. (SMEP has been enabled since Oracle Solaris 11.1 on Intel's Ivy Bridge and later processors, but was not previously reported by the sxadm command. AMD support came later.)

#OracleSolaris 11.4.63 extends the per-file audit record for files accessed on mounted kerberized NFS shares to add the Kerberos principal to the subject token which holds information about the user.

The packages network/legacy-remote-utilities and service/network/legacy-remote-utilities have been split in #OracleSolaris 11.4.63 to allow better control over which servers and clients are installed, and to allow sites to remove the insecure legacy BSD sockets software while retaining the ONC-RPC software.

These packages are no longer included in the system provided install groups, so sites that still need these will need to add them to the list of packages to install on fresh installations.

System admins sometimes need to ensure that "long running" jobs
have completed before a reboot. To support this, #OracleSolaris 11.4.63 has added the ability for an authorized administrator to temporarily disable system reboot/halt by adding a new maintenance type to the existing 'sysadm maintain' subcommand.

Further information can be found in the updated versions of the halt(8), init(8), shutdown(8), and sysadm(8) man pages.