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Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU90 released

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Despite continuous rumors to the contrary, Oracle is still actively developing Solaris, and it’s been more active than ever lately. Yesterday, the company pushed out another release for customers with the proper support contracts: Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU90. Aside from the various package updates to bring them up to speed with the latest releases, this new Solaris version also comes with a slew of improvements for ZFS.

ZFS changes in Oracle Solaris 11.4.90 include more flexibility in setting retention properties when receiving a new file system, and adding the ability for zfs scrub and resilver to run before all the blocks have been freed from previous zfs destroy operations. (This requires upgrading pools to the new zpool version 54.)

↫ Alan Coopersmith

You can now also set boot environments to never be destroyed by either manual or automatic means, and more work has been done to prevent a specific type of bug that would accidentally kill all running processes on the system. It seems some programs mistakenly use -1 as a pid value in kill() calls.

Now in 11.4.90, the kill system call was modified to not allow processes to use a pid of -1 unless they’d specifically set a process flag that they intend to kill all processes first, to help with programs that didn’t check for errors when finding the process id for the singular process they wanted to kill.

↫ Alan Coopersmith

There’s many more changes and improvements, of course, and hopefully, we’ll get to see these in the next CBE release as well, so us mere mortals without expensive support contracts can benefit from them too.

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Thom Holwerda

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3 Comments

  1. 2026-02-21 6:38 pm
    Nico57

    Sudo and other programs randomly sending SIGHUP to ALL processes is totally crazy!
    (see https://github.com/sudo-project/sudo/issues/458 linked from the article referenced above)

    • 2026-02-22 12:41 am
      moriarty99779

      So, what does this have to do with a Solaris release? The link you provided is for an issue that occurs on AIX, which is IBM’s version of commercial UNIX.

      • 2026-02-22 1:28 am
        Alfman verbose=1

        moriarty99779,

        So, what does this have to do with a Solaris release? The link you provided is for an issue that occurs on AIX, which is IBM’s version of commercial UNIX.

        While the sudo ticket was in terms of AIX, it seems to a broader bug that affects multiple operating systems. Nico57’s link came from Alan Coopersmith working on Oracle releases…

        https://hachyderm.io/@alanc/116105777977729808

        Work continued on trying to prevent bugs that result in killing all processes on the system by mistake, in response to customers hitting https://github.com/sudo-project/sudo/issues/458 last year, and bugs in other programs using -1 as a pid value in kill() calls by mistake.

        Previously, in #OracleSolaris 11.4.83, killpg() was made to reject the always invalid process group id of 1, instead of turning it into the “kill all processes” argument of -1 to kill().

        Now in 11.4.90, the kill system call was modified to not allow processes to use a pid of -1 unless they’d specifically set a process flag that they intend to kill all processes first, to help with programs that didn’t check for errors when finding the process id for the singular process they wanted to kill.

        So it sounds like oracle modified some syscalls in response to this sudo bug, which was killing unrelated processes. I haven’t investigated this beyond reading these threads, but if sudo is already fixed, I’m not sure how important oracle’s changes really are. It’s tempting to say that it’s not really the operating system’s fault if a process that has legitimate root access has software faults that inappropriately kill processes.