Oracle announced today they are going to be reducing the frequency of software updates for Solaris 11.4 and their ZFS Storage Appliance software.

Currently Oracle ships a new SRU each month for Oracle Solaris 11.4 and ZFS Storage Appliance for three releases per quarter. But moving forward they will be only shipping two planned updates per quarter.

Oracle will align their Solaris Critical Patch Update micro-release with the Oracle quarterly security release cycle and then follow-up with a support repository update around six weeks later for any new capabilities and enhancements. That latter one in effect being a feature release, for whatever features are left to add to Solaris 11.4.

In the [1]announcement of this change, they feel the cadence will simplify lifecycle management and that based on statistics many of their customers are already applying updates just twice per quarter.

While many years ago there was talk of [2]Solaris 12 and [3]an 11.4 successor expected around 2020 , that never panned out with Oracle just [4]affirming Oracle Solaris 11 support to the next decade with continuing to deliver just incremental improvements in succeeding Solaris 11.4 updates. Oracle had [5]laid off many Solaris engineers years ago.



[1] https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris/announcing-a-new-simplified-support-repository-update-sru-schedule-for-oracle-solaris-11-4-and-zfs-storage-appliance-software"

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/search/Solaris+12

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Solaris-11.4-To-Next-Roadmap

[4] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Oracle-Reaffirms-Solaris-2034

[5] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Oracle-Solaris-Hit-Hard