System Administration Guide: Basic Administration

Description of a menu.lst File That Supports Hypervisor Technology

You can run the Solaris OS as a virtualized control domain, with the hypervisor. To run the Solaris release with this support, there must be an entry in menu.lst file that specifies the hypervisor. This entry can either be the default boot menu item, or you can select this entry manually at boot time. After you upgrade your system for the first time to a Solaris release that includes this support, the bootadm command automatically adds a GRUB menu.lst entry for the hypervisor.

The following are menu.lst entries for this GRUB implementation:


title Solaris on xVM
kernel$ /boot/$ISADIR/xen.gz
module$ /platform/i86xpv/kernel/$ISADIR/unix /platform/i86xpv/kernel/$ISADIR/unix -B $ZFS-BOOTFS
module$ /platform/i86pc/$ISADIR/boot_archive

Note that the path to UNIX in the menu.lst entry for the hypervisor uses i86xpv, not i86pc. The options that are interpreted by the hypervisor are added to end of the kernel$ line, after the xen.gz file information.

If you choose to run the Solaris release as a stand-alone OS, you can continue to use the same GRUB menu entries that you used previously.

For example:


title Solaris Nevada ... X86
kernel$ /platform/i86pc/kernel/$ISADIR/unix -B $ZFS-BOOTFS
module$ /platform/i86pc/$ISADIR/boot_archive

For more information about how to modify GRUB menu.lst entries, see x86: How to Modify Boot Behavior by Editing the menu.lst File.