The Solaris System and x86 Platforms

With the introduction of the Sun xVM hypervisor, there are now two platform implementations on the x86 architecture. The implementation names are returned by the uname command with the -i option and refer to the same machine, i86pc.

• i86pc refers to the Solaris system directly installed on the physical system, also known as running on bare metal.

• i86xpv refers to the Solaris system running both paravirtualized and fully virtualized on top of an xVM hypervisor.

Applications should use the uname command with the -p option. On x86 platforms, regardless of whether the Solaris system is running under xVM, this option always returns i386. The -p option is equivalent to using the -m option in some other operating systems.