Solaris 11.4 Beta Updated With Spectre V1 Mitigation, Systemd Bit To Make GNOME Happy

While some at Oracle were busy releasing Oracle Linux 7 Update 5 as their RHEL7 downstream, the remaining Solaris developers were putting out a refreshed public beta spin of Solaris 11.4.

Oracle Solaris 11.4 went into public beta back in January with switching to the GNOME 3 desktop and other changes albeit nothing grand like some would have liked to see out of the presumably canned "Solaris 12". Today the latest beta release of Solaris 11.4 is now available.

With today's Solaris 11.4 Open Beta update there is now ZFS support for device removal and scheduled scrubbing. This Solaris 11.4 update also pulls in SMB 3.1.1 support, Oracle Solaris Cluster Compliance checking, and ssh-ldap-getpubkey support.

Also notable is this beta refresh now mitigates against the Spectre Variant One vulnerability, including for Firefox and the NVIDIA graphics driver. The updated Solaris 11.4 also pulls in the updated GCC 7.3 compiler and several other updated packages.

Longtime Solaris developer Alan Coopersmith tweeted there's also "a small systemd-compatibility interface I put in to make our GNOME port work better", though it just seems to indicate Solaris is now shipping an /etc/os-release file.

More details on the updated Solaris 11.4 public build via today's blog post.