Issues You Need to Know About Before Installing Solaris 8 Software

Locale Installation Mechanism Change

The locale support installation mechanism has changed in the Solaris 8 operating environment. In the Solaris 2.5.1, 2.6, and 7 operating environments, the level of locale support installed depended on the software cluster chosen. The Solaris 8 operating environment includes a new installation interface that prompts you to select specific geographic regions for which you require locale support. Therefore, you have more freedom to customize the configuration of your system when you install the Solaris 8 operating environment more than was possible in the Solaris 2.5.1, 2.6, and 7 operating environments.

Notice especially the following behaviors:

You must select the locales to be installed during the initial installation in the Geographic Selection screen. C (POSIX locale) and en_US.UTF-8 (Unicode support) are the only locales that are automatically installed.
When you upgrade from previous releases, some of the locales are automatically selected depending on the available locales on the system to be upgraded. Note that English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Swedish partial locales were always present on the system in the Solaris 2.5.1, 2.6, and 7 operating environments.
Unicode locales (UTF-8) have a feature to enable multilingual text input. Because these locales use Asian input methods that are provided by each individual locale, install those Asian locales for which you need to type text.

Do Not Install a Large Partition on Systems That Already Have `symhisl`, `mega`, or `cpqncr` Disk Controller Drivers Installed

If you attempt to install a large partition (one that extends beyond the 8-Gbyte boundary) on a disk that uses any of the controllers listed next, the installed system does not behave properly.

The Solaris operating environment installation program cannot detect that the driver does not support large partitions. The installation continues without displaying an error. However, when you reboot your system, the reboot may fail.

Even if you successfully reboot your system, it will fail later because of other changes related to boot devices or added packages. The disk controllers associated with these drivers are:

Symbios 53C896-based controllers (symhisl)

AMI MegaRAID controllers (mega)

Compaq 53C8xx-based SCSI controllers (cpqncr)

Workaround: Do not install a large partition that extends beyond the first 8 Gbytes of a disk on systems that have disk controllers driven by the symhisl, mega, or cpqncr drivers.

Update the DPT PM2144UW Controller BIOS to the Latest Revision Before Upgrading to the Solaris 8 Operating Environment

The Solaris 8 operating environment includes a new feature that enables you to install large partitions. The DPT PM2144UW controller's BIOS must support Logical Block Addressing (LBA). The latest revision of the BIOS fully supports LBA access. The problem can also affect other DPT controller models.

Workaround: Prior to upgrading your system to the Solaris 8 operating environment, ensure that the DPT PM2144UW controller's BIOS is the latest available version from DPT.

To determine if your system has a DPT controller, perform the following steps:

Run the prtconf -D.
If the name dpt is displayed, run the card's configuration utility to obtain information about the model and BIOS revision.
Upgrade DPT PM2144UW controllers by flashing the BIOS or by installing the latest BIOS EPROM obtained from DPT. See http://www.dpt.com for the latest BIOS images for all DPT controllers.

You can now upgrade the system to the Solaris 8 operating environment.

Do Not Upgrade Hewlett-Packard (HP) Vectra XU Series Systems With BIOS Version GG.06.13

The Solaris 8 operating environment includes a new feature that enables you to install large partitions. The system BIOS must support Logical Block Addressing (LBA). BIOS Version GG.06.13 does not support LBA access. The Solaris boot programs cannot manage this conflict. The problem can also affect other HP Vectra systems.

If you perform this upgrade, your HP system will no longer boot. Only a blank black screen with a flashing underbar cursor is displayed.

Workaround: Do not upgrade HP Vectra XU Series systems with the latest BIOS Version GG.06.13 to the Solaris 8 operating environment because it no longer supports these systems.

You can still boot your system using the boot diskette or boot CD because the boot paths do not use the hard disk code. Then select the hard disk as your bootable device instead of the network or CD-ROM drive.

Direct Memory Access (DMA) Is Disabled on PCI-IDE Systems

By default, the Solaris ata device driver has the DMA feature disabled for ATA/ATAPI devices. Installing the Solaris 8 operating environment works properly with DMA disabled.

To enable the DMA feature for improved performance, see .