Patch Tools

In previous releases, patch installation and removal tools and their corresponding documentation were delivered as part of each patch shipped. These tools are now part of the Solaris software, which provides the following benefits:

• There is less wasted space on user systems. (Tools are installed once instead of with each patch.)

• Multiple patch handling is easier.

New Patch Commands

The patchadd and patchrm commands are used to add and remove patches from a Solaris 2.x system. They cannot be used to manage patches on a Solaris 1.x system.

You can add one or more patches to a system, client, service, or a net install image.

A patch is added to the local system by typing, for example:

# patchadd /var/spool/patch/104946-02

A patch is added to a client by specifying the client's root directory on a server, for example:

server# patchadd -R /export/root/client1 /var/spool/patch/104946-02

A patch is added to a service area (a usr file system, from any Solaris release setup on a server that is usually mounted as read only by the clients the server serves) by specifying the service area on the server, for example:

server# patchadd -S Solaris_2.3 /var/spool/patch/104946-02

If a patch contains both root and usr packages in the patch, the patchadd command must be issued twice: once with the -R option to apply the patch's root package, and once with the -S option to apply the patch's usr package.

See the patchadd(1M) and patchrm(1M) man pages and System Administration Guide for more information.

Isalist

Isalist is a set of utilities for SPARC systems that enables users to find out which instruction sets are supported on their machines and also to determine which one will perform the best for them. The set of utilities include:

• The isalist command, which prints out an ordered list of supported instruction set

• The optisa command, which prints out the best instruction set out of this list

• A pragmatic interface, which is the equivalent of using the sysinfo system call

Currently there are many variations of the SPARC processor, some of which can be treated as separate instruction sets. An application binary that is compiled for one variation may not run, or may run with performance degradation, or may run normally on a machine implementing a different variation. The Isalist utilities provide a standard interface so users can choose their application binary correctly to obtain maximum performance. For example, a system administrator can write a wrapper script and use the output of isalist and optisa to choose the appropriate binary for a given application.