Installing a Sun4U Flash Archive on a Sun4V Machine

Before You Begin

Note the following limitations to this procedure:

• These instructions are for simple installations only, not for the following:

  • Installations with zones.

  • Installations with attached storage.

  • Installations with fibre attached or with SAN in use.

• These instructions are for installing through the primary interface only. See CR 6772769.

• These instructions may not work with volume-managed root (encapsulated).

• These instructions are for a UFS root only. Solaris Flash installation of a ZFS root system uses a different installation mechanism.

1. Create a Solaris Flash archive on a Sun4U machine, so that the archive can be installed on a Sun4V machine. Use one of the following two options to add Sun4V as a supported architecture for the archive.

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   Note –

   You must start with a Sun4U machine that has been installed with the Entire Plus OEM Software Group, so that all the driver packages are in the image, even if these packages are not in use. For further information about this requirement, see SPARC: Supporting Peripheral Devices Not Found on the Master System.

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   • Add the following information to the /var/sadm/system/admin/.platform file. Then, create the Solaris Flash archive.

     PLATFORM_GROUP=sun4v

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     Note –

     You can verify that the Sun4V platform group is supported by using the following command:

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     # flar -i <path_to_hybrid>.flar | grep content_architectures

     This command should display the following results:

     content_architectures=sun4u,sun4v

   • Create the Solaris Flash archive, using the -U option to add Sun4V as a supported architecture for the archive. See the following example:

     # flarcreate -n S10U5hybrid -U "content_architectures=sun4u,sun4v" \ -c -x /data /data/S10U5hybrid.flar

     The above sample command provides /data for the -c option, to indicate the location for the archive. Your value for this -c option should reflect your file setup.

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     Note –

     You can verify that the Sun4V platform group is supported by using the flar command again as shown in the previous step.

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2. Install the Solaris Flash archive on the Sun4V machine. You can use Solaris JumpStart and a net image to deploy the Solaris Flash archive.

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   Note –

   At this point, the Sun4V machine may not boot. Do not try to patch the machine at this stage. If the machine is allowed to reboot after using JumpStart, you will probably see a message such as:

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   Boot device: /pci@780/pci@0/pci@9/scsi@0/disk@0,0:a File and args: Boot load failed. The file just loaded does not appear to be executable.

3. Upgrade the Sun4V machine using either a network image or a DVD image.

   For example, you could use a Solaris 10 Update 6 JumpStart image. Then, you could boot the Sun4V image from that network image, selecting the upgrade option.

   In this example, the upgrade completes with the following issues:

   • Where both .u and .v versions of a package were available, both versions will be installed. See CR 6846077.

   • The /var/sadm/system/admin/.platform file contains incorrect information. See CR 6523030.

   • Any third party .v packages are not part of the Solaris image. So, third party packages will probably not be upgraded.

4. Boot the Sun4V machine. You can now apply patches to the machine as needed.