Oracle Provides CBE Release of Solaris 11.4 for Open Source

In 2017, Oracle reduced the staff of the teams responsible for Solaris, a Unix operating system acquired with Sun Microsystems 12 years ago, which did not bode well for its long-term future. The American publisher is nevertheless pursuing developments on the OS by using a continuous delivery model based on SRUs (support repository update). Newly developed features and fixes are provided as updates delivered monthly. The latest SRU42 dates back to February 15, 2022.

These regular updates replace the release of periodic versions of the OS, major or minor, delivered in GA (general availability), that of Solaris 11.4 being released in August 2018. This change in its way of delivering therefore now leads Oracle to announce a “Common Build Environment” (CBE) version of Solaris 11.4. This one is especially intended for open source developers and for personal non-production use. In a post published on March 2, the publisher of Redwood Shores recalls that the GA versions were historically intended for non-production use for open source software development, testing and proof of concept (PoC) deployments. “With the move to a continuous delivery model, many new features that have been added to Oracle Solaris 11.4 are not available in a release with a non-production license,” Oracle explains, adding that SRUs also contain updates. free and open source software included in Oracle Solaris. “Source code with build instructions and patches are available on our Solaris repository on GitHub. Some of the Oracle Solaris patches allow free and open source software to take advantage of features provided after 11.4.0.

CBEs, similar to a beta

CBE builds are similar to a beta, Oracle further explains. These are pre-release builds of a particular SRU. If they do not always contain all the patches of the SRU in question, on the other hand, they contain all the patches provided so far on the previous SRUs. The CBE versions cannot be used for a production release, it will be necessary to be able to do so to have previously subscribed to an Oracle support contract. From then on, an update will be made from the CBE to the latest SRU.

Solaris 11 versions must be maintained until 2031 through Premier Support contracts and until 2034 with Extended Support, as Oracle states in a document summarizing its support policy for its various software.