Upgrade Issues

Cannot Use Solaris Installation CD to Upgrade Intel Systems to the Solaris 8 Operating Environment

You cannot use Solaris Web Start 3.0 on the Solaris 8 Installation CD to upgrade IA-based systems from the Solaris 2.6 or 7 operating environments to the Solaris 8 operating environment because of the x86 boot partition requirement. Use the Solaris Software 1 of 2 CD to upgrade to the Solaris 8 operating environment on IA-based systems.

Priority Paging Is Not Needed With the New Solaris 8 Caching Architecture

The Solaris 8 operating environment introduces a new file system caching architecture, which subsumes the Solaris 7 Priority Paging functionality. You should not set the system variable priority_paging in the Solaris 8 operating environment, and you should remove the variable from the /etc/system file when systems are upgraded to the Solaris 8 operating environment.

The new caching architecture removes most of the pressure on the virtual memory system that resulted from file system activity. As a result, the new caching architecture changes the dynamics of the memory paging statistics, which makes observing system memory characteristics simpler. However, several of the statistics report significantly different values. You should consider these differences when analyzing memory behavior or setting performance monitoring thresholds. The most notable differences are:

• The number of page reclaims is higher, which you should consider normal operation during heavy file system activity.

• The amount of free memory is higher because the free memory count now includes a large component of the file system cache.

• Scan rates are almost zero unless there is a shortage of system-wide available memory. Scanning is no longer used to replace the free list during normal file system I/O.