General Information

This section provides general information such as behavior changes in Solaris 10 OS.

BIOS and Firmware Upgrade

The Solaris 10 5/09 release of Solaris is tested on all supported Sun systems running the latest combinations of the following:

• BIOS and ILOM

• SPARC Firmware and OBP and Hypervisor

For best results using the Solaris 10 5/09 release, upgrade your BIOS/Firmware to the latest release listed in the matrix at http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/patches/firmware/release_history.jsp.

New Memory Requirements

The following are the minimum and recommended memory requirements for the Solaris 10 5/09 release:

• For UFS root file systems:

  • 384 Mbytes of minimum memory

  • 512 Mbytes is the recommended memory

• For ZFS root file systems:

  • 786 Mbytes of minimum memory

  • 1 Gbyte of memory is recommended for overall ZFS performance

Changes in Upgrade Support for Solaris Releases

Starting with the Solaris 10 8/07 release, for SPARC systems, you can upgrade the Solaris OS only from the following releases:

• Solaris 8 OS

• Solaris 9 OS

• Solaris 10 OS

For x86 systems, you can upgrade the Solaris OS only from the following releases:

• Solaris 9 OS

• Solaris 10 OS

To upgrade releases previous to the Solaris 8 software to the Solaris 10 5/09 software, upgrade to any of the releases in the preceding list first. Then upgrade to the Solaris 10 5/09 release.

Support for Products Not Part of the Solaris OS

The Solaris 10 5/09 has been tested for compatibility with previous releases in line with Solaris's compatibility guarantee. This means that applications, including third party applications, which adhere to Solaris's published ABI will work without modification on the Solaris 10 5/09 release. For more information, see the Solaris Application Guarantee Program at http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/guarantee.jsp.

Your system might run both a Solaris OS and other products that are not part of the Solaris software. These products might be supplied by either Sun or another company. If you upgrade this system to the Solaris 10 release, make sure that these other products are also supported on the Solaris 10 OS. Depending on the status of each of these products, you can perform one of the following options:

• Verify that the existing version of the product is supported on the Solaris 10 software.

• Install a new version of the product that is supported on the Solaris 10 release. You might need to remove the previous version of the product prior to upgrading to the Solaris software. See the product documentation for more details.

• Remove the product prior to upgrading to the Solaris 10 software.