Patch Management User Guide for HP-UX 11.x Systems

Critical and noncritical patches
HP-UX patches are considered to be either critical or noncritical. You can determine whether a
patch is labeled as critical by looking at the Critical field on the patch details page or in the patch
text file for the patch. This field identifies newly delivered critical content.
HP considers a patch to be critical if the patch provides a fix for a critical problem. Examples
include patches that provide fixes for the following problems:
• System panic or hang
• Process abort, hang, or failure
• Data corruption
• Severe performance degradation
• Application-specific critical issues
HP considers a patch to be noncritical if the patch provides fixes for only noncritical problems.
Examples of noncritical problems include the following:
• Extraneous debug, warning, or error messages
• Failure to address all documented issues
• Minor regressions in behavior
A patch is considered critical if it contains any critical fixes, even if they were introduced in
earlier (superseded) patches. The Critical field for such a patch contains the following text:
"No (superseded patches were critical)"
In addition, the field gives the ID of the patch that introduced the critical fix. The Critical field
for patch PHSS_30011 is shown in the following screen. It shows that superseded patch
PHSS_29735 actually introduced the critical fix.
Critical:No (superseded patches were critical)
PHSS_29735: CORRUPTION
Critical patches have a critical category tag. The category tags (and swlist command used
to acquire the category tags) for patch PHSS_30011 are shown in the following screen. See
“Category tags” (page 20) for more information.
$ swlist -l product -a category_tag PHSS_30011
# Initializing...
# Contacting target "some_system"...
#
# Target: some_system:/
# PHSS_30011 patch defect_repair general_release critical
enhancement corruption manual_dependencies
Finding information for a specific patch
The best place to obtain information about a specific patch is the patch's patch details page on the
ITRC.
Patch documentation
All patches have a patch details page, a patch text file, and readme information. The patch details
page should be your first choice for obtaining information because it contains the most up-to-date
information available. This is not always true for the patch text file or the patch readme.
You can find the documentation at the following resources:
• See Chapter 6: “Using the IT Resource Center” (page 55). For the patch details page, go to
the ITRC website at http://itrc.hp.com.
• The patch text file will be in the downloaded file after you download a patch from the ITRC.
See Chapter 6: “Using the IT Resource Center” (page 55).
• The patch readme will be on the system after you install the patch.
36 HP-UX patch overview