System Administration Guide: Basic Administration

Package and Patching Tools Enhancements to Support Oracle Solaris Zones

Oracle Solaris 10 10/09: Starting with this release, the following enhancements have been made to the package and patching tools to support systems that have multiple non-global zones installed:

Parallel Patching of Zones

The Parallel Patching of Zones feature introduces enhancements to the standard Oracle Solaris 10 patching tools to enable patching of non-global zones in parallel. This feature enhancement improves patching performance when multiple non-global zones are installed on a system by accelerating the time it takes to patch systems. Because zones are isolated environments, it is safe to patch multiple zones in parallel. This ability applies to both sparse zones and whole root zones.

These improvements primarily include changes to the patchadd and patchrm commands. A new configuration file, /etc/patch/pdo.conf, can be modified to specify a number that defines how many zones are patched in parallel.

Note –
If you are not running at least the Solaris 10 10/09 release, the feature is implemented through patch 119254-66, or later revision (SPARC), and 119255-66, or later revision (x86). The global zone is still patched before the non-global zones are patched.

For more information, see the patchadd(1M) and the patchrm(1M) man pages.
Turbo-Charging of SVr4 Packaging Commands

This feature accelerates the time it takes to install the Solaris OS, use Solaris Live Upgrade, or install non-global zones by using SVr4 package commands. Note that this feature cannot be disabled.

For more details about these and other enhancements that support the use of package and patch tools in a zones environment, see the following documentation: