Installation guide

TABLE 2–1 Solaris 2.6 Features at a Glance (continued)
Feature Description
Versioning/
Scoped Libraries
Developers of shared libraries can now have better control over the public interfaces that
they offer. This helps to control the dependencies that applications have on these shared
libraries. This means the applications are more portable and less affected by changes in the
shared libraries, thus leading to higher quality products for both. In the Solaris 2.6
operating environment, the system libraries take advantage of this technology and have
been both scoped and versioned.
Scheduler
Activations
Scheduler activations provide additional kernel scheduling support for multithreaded
applications.
Pre-emption
Control
Pre-emption Control allows application control over kernel pre-emption.
/proc File
System and
Watchpoints
The previous flat /proc file system has been restructured into a directory hierarchy that
contains additional subdirectories for state information and control functions. It also
provides a watchpoint facility to monitor access to and modifications of data in the process
address space. The adb(1) command uses this facility to provide watchpoints.
Federated
Naming Service
(FNS)
FNS is now compliant with the X/Open XFN CAE definition. FNS has also been enhanced
to include support for Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) as well as providing
improved support for the files and NIS back ends.
Asynchronous I/
O
Asynchronous I/O support for tapes provides an interface to improve performance on
high-performance tape devices. With the ability to queue up I/O requests, this feature
significantly improves the I/O throughput.
Solaris Developer
Kit (SDK)
The SDK software is now built into the Solaris operating environment and is no longer an
unbundled product. All the information a developer needs to produce applications and
graphics handlers for end-user Solaris runtime environments is now available in this
Solaris release.
Graphics
XGL
TM The XGL 2-D and 3-D immediate-mode API provides portability across hardware
platforms and optimal performance from graphics acceleration. The XGL API includes
support for raster text, environment and vertex-level texture mapping, four-component
texture mapping, DGA transparent overlay, and triangle list Gcache.
2-6 Information Library for Solaris 2.6 (Intel Platform Edition) ♦ August 1997