Installation guide

The SATA mode setting in BIOS must not be changed after an initial Solaris installation. The
SATA mode setting must also not be changed before or after a Solaris upgrade. If the SATA
mode BIOS setting is modied after installing Solaris, the system will reset and fail to boot
without indicating what led to the failure.
Workaround: If boot failure is encountered as a result of changing the BIOS setting, revert back
to the original setting in order to boot Solaris.
Deferred Activation Patching (6486471)
Starting with patch 119254-42 and 119255-42, the patch installation utilities, patchadd and
patchrm, have been modied to change the way that certain patches delivering new features or
existing les that are incompatible with the running system are handled. This utilities
modication aects the installation of these patches on any Solaris 10 release. These
“deferred-activation” patches handle the large scope of change delivered in Kernel patches
better.
In deferred Activation patching, a loopback le system, lofs, is used to create a copy of the root
le system. The original les being patched are copied to a safe location and the lofs copy of the
root le system is patched. Then the original le is lofs mounted back over the new le as it is
patched. This means the running system remains consistent over the duration of patching, new
features are not active and any incompatible change is hidden until the user reboots.
Users must reboot as soon as possible after applying a Deferred Activation Patch, but they do
not have to reboot immediately, they can still add further patches then reboot.
The patch README provides instructions on which patches require a reboot.
Note – Sun strongly recommends that patch operations are carried out in a single-user mode,
especially when this is recommended by the patch README.
If you are running non-global zones or have lofs disabled, consider the following points when
installing or removing deferred-activation patches:
■
All non-global zones must be in a halted state for this patch operation. You must halt the
non-global zone before applying the patch.
■
Deferred-activation patching requires the loopback le system, lofs in order to complete
successfully. Systems running Sun Cluster 3.1 or Sun Cluster 3.2 are likely to have lofs
turned o because of restrictions on HA-NFS functionality when lofs is enabled. Therefore,
before a deferred-activation patch is installed, you must re-enable the loopback le system
by performing the following steps.
1. Remove or comment out the following line in the /etc/system le:
exclude:lofs
System Administration
Solaris 10 10/09 Release Notes • October 2009104