Activating a Boot Environment

Activating a boot environment makes it bootable on the next reboot of the system. You can also switch back quickly to the original boot environment if a failure occurs on booting the newly active boot environment. See Failure Recovery: Falling Back to the Original Boot Environment (Command-Line Interface).

To successfully activate a boot environment, that boot environment must meet the following conditions:

The boot environment must have a status of “complete.” To check status, see Displaying the Status of All Boot Environments.
If the boot environment is not the current boot environment, you cannot have mounted the partitions of that boot environment by using lumount(1M) or mount(1M).
The boot environment that you want to activate cannot be involved in a comparison operation. See Comparing Boot Environments.

Note –

If you want to reconfigure swap, make this change prior to booting the inactive boot environment. By default, all boot environments share the same swap devices. To reconfigure swap, see “To Create a New Boot Environment,” Step 9 or To Create a Boot Environment and Reconfigure Swap (Command-Line Interface).

x86: (Optional) To Update the Boot Diskette Before Activating

If you're not using the Solaris Device Configuration Assistant x86 Platform Edition diskette to boot the system, you can skip this procedure. If you use the Device Configuration Assistant to boot, you need to update the boot diskette. This procedure matches a boot diskette to your release by overwriting the existing diskette or writing to a new diskette.

Insert the Solaris Device Configuration Assistant x86 Platform Edition diskette. This is either the existing diskette that is overwritten or a new diskette.

Update the boot diskette with the latest image for this release.

Eject the boot diskette.

Type:
volcheck

Copy the new boot environment's boot/solaris/bootenv.rc file to the diskette.
cp /a/boot/solaris/bootenv.rc /floppy/floppy0/solaris/bootenv.rc

Check the input-device and output-device on the diskette to ensure that they are correct. If not, then update them.

You are ready to activate the new boot environment.

To Activate a Boot Environment (Character Interface)

The first time you boot from a newly created boot environment, Solaris Live Upgrade software synchronizes the new boot environment with the boot environment that was last active. “Synchronize” means that certain critical system files and directories are copied from the last-active boot environment to the boot environment being booted. Solaris Live Upgrade does not perform this synchronization after this initial boot, unless you request to do so when prompted to force a synchronization.

For more information on synchronization, see Synchronizing Files Between Boot Environments.

From the Solaris Live Upgrade main menu, select Activate.

Type the name of the boot environment to make active:

Name of Boot Environment: Solaris_9
Do you want to force a Live Upgrade sync operations: no

You can either continue or force a synchronization of files.
- Press Return to continue.
  
  The first time that the boot environment is booted, files are automatically synchronized.
- You can force a synchronization of files, but use this feature with caution. Operating systems on each boot environment must be compatible with files that are being synchronized. To force a synchronization of files, type:
  Do you want to force a Live Upgrade sync operations: yes
  Caution –
  Use a forced synchronization with great care, because you might not be aware or in control of changes that might have occurred in the last-active boot environment. For example, if you were running Solaris 9 software on your current boot environment and booted back to a Solaris 7 release with a forced synchronization, files could be changed on the Solaris 7 release. Because files are dependent on the release of the operating environment, the boot to the Solaris 7 release could fail because the Solaris 9 files might not be compatible with the Solaris 7 files.

Press F3 to begin the activation process.

Press Return to continue.

The new boot environment is activated at the next reboot.

To activate the inactive boot environment, reboot:
# init 6

To Activate a Boot Environment (Command-Line Interface)

To activate the boot environment, type:
# /usr/sbin/luactivate BE_name
BE_name

Specifies the name of the boot environment that is to be activated

Reboot.
# init 6
Caution –
Use only the init or shutdown commands to reboot. If you use the reboot, halt, or uadmin commands, the system does not switch boot environments. The last active boot environment is booted again.

Example 36–10 Activating a Boot Environment (Command-Line Interface)

In this example, the second_disk boot environment is activated at the next reboot.

# /usr/sbin/luactivate second_disk
# init 6

To Activate a Boot Environment and Synchronize Files (Command-Line Interface)

The first time you boot from a newly created boot environment, Solaris Live Upgrade software synchronizes the new boot environment with the boot environment that was last active. “Synchronize” means that certain critical system files and directories are copied from the last-active boot environment to the boot environment being booted. Solaris Live Upgrade does not perform this synchronization after the initial boot, unless you force synchronization with the luactivate command and the -s option.

For more information on synchronization, see Synchronizing Files Between Boot Environments.

To activate the boot environment, type:
# /usr/sbin/luactivate -s BE_name
-s

Forces a synchronization of files between the last-active boot environment and the new boot environment. The first time that a boot environment is activated, the files between the boot environment are synchronized With subsequent activations, the files are not synchronized unless you use the -s option.

Caution –
Use this option with great care, because you might not be aware or in control of changes that might have occurred in the last-active boot environment. For example, if you were running Solaris 9 software on your current boot environment and booted back to a Solaris 7 release with a forced synchronization, files could be changed on the Solaris 7 release. Because files are dependent on the release of the operating environment, the boot to the Solaris 7 release could fail because the Solaris 9 files might not be compatible with the Solaris 7 files.

BE_name

Specifies the name of the boot environment that is to be activated.

Reboot.
# init 6

Example 36–11 Activating a Boot Environment (Command-Line Interface)

In this example, the second_disk boot environment is activated at the next reboot and the files are synchronized.

# /usr/sbin/luactivate -s second_disk
# init 6