Solaris 11 and several Illumos-based distributions: OpenIndiana, OmniOS, XStreamOS[2] and a growing number of layered applications, including GlassFish, across a variety of Operating System platforms. IPS is coded in the Python
Use of ZFS, allowing multiple boot environments and easy package operation rollbacks
Transactional actions
Support for multiple platform architectures within a single package
Legacy support for SVR4 packages
Extensive search grammar
Remote search capability
Changes-only based package updates
Network package repository
File and network-based package publication
Package operation history
On-disk package format (p5p)
Multi-platform ports for layered applications:
Broad platform support:
AIX
Cross-platform update notification and package management
Graphical user interfaces
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Considerations
Due to the fact that IPS delivers each file in a separate shelf[clarification needed] with a separate checksum, a package update only needs to replace files that have been modified. When dealing with ELF binaries, IPS computes checksums only from the loaded parts of an ELF binary[citation needed]. This means in practice that when only the ELF comment section has been changed, there would be no need to update it. However, this method of delivery can cause slower operation when the input source is on a medium with high latency (e.g. internet with higher round trip time or CD/DVD media with slow seeks).
