Oracle Solaris 11.4 Public Beta Updated With KPTI For Addressing Meltdown

In addition to sending down a new SRU for Solaris 11.3, the Oracle developers left maintaining Solaris have issued their second beta of the upcoming Solaris 11.4.

Oracle Solaris 11.4 Open Beta Refresh 2 is an updated version of their public beta of Solaris 11.4 originally introduced in January. They say this is the last planned public beta with the general availability release now nearing availability.

Among the changes in this Solaris 11.4 beta update are updates to "56 popular open-source libraries and utilities", a new explain sub-command for the compliance utility, and other security/performance enhancements.

A half-year after the Meltdown Intel CPU vulnerability was disclosed, the Solaris 11.4 code-base also now has a Kernel Page Table Isolation (KPTI) implementation to mitigate x86 systems from this CPU vulnerability.

Details on this updated Solaris 11.4 beta spin can be found via the Oracle blog.