Administering Automatic Boot Archive Recovery

Starting with the Oracle Solaris 11 Express release, boot archive recovery on the SPARC platform is fully automated. If you are running Oracle Solaris 11 Express, boot archive recovery on the x86 platform is automated through the Fast Reboot feature.

To support auto-recovery of the boot archives on the x86 platform, a new auto-reboot-safe property has been added to the boot configuration SMF service, svc:/system/boot-config:default. By default, this property's value is set to false, which prevents the system from automatically rebooting to an unknown boot device. However, if your system is configured to automatically reboot to the BIOS boot device and default GRUB menu entry that the Oracle Solaris OS is installed on, you can enable automatic recovery of the boot archives by setting this property's value to true. The following procedure describes how to clear automatic boot archive update failures on the x86 platform.

For information about how to clear automatic boot archive update failures by using the bootadm command, see How to Clear Automatic Boot Archive Update Failures by Using the bootadm Command.

x86: How to Clear Automatic Boot Archive Update Failures by Using the auto-reboot-safe Property

On an x86 based systems, during the process of booting the system, if a warning similar to the following is displayed, take action as described in the following procedure.

WARNING: Reboot required.
The system has updated the cache of files (boot archive) that is used
during the early boot sequence. To avoid booting and running the system
with the previously out-of-sync version of these files, reboot the
system from the same device that was previously booted.

The system then enters system maintenance mode.

1. Become the root user.
2. Reboot the system.

   # reboot

   To prevent this type of failure, if the active BIOS boot device and the GRUB menu entries point to the current boot instance, do the following:

3. Set the auto-reboot-safe property of the svc:/system/boot-config SMF service to true, as follows:

   # svccfg -s svc:/system/boot-config:default setprop config/auto-reboot-safe = true

4. Verify that the auto-reboot-safe property is set correctly.

   # svccfg -s svc:/system/boot-config:default listprop |grep config/auto-reboot-safe
   config/auto-reboot-safe            boolean  true

How to Clear Automatic Boot Archive Update Failures by Using the bootadm Command

During the process of booting the system, if a warning message that is similar to the following is displayed, take action accordingly:

WARNING: Automatic update of the boot archive failed.
Update the archives using 'bootadm update-archive'
command and then reboot the system from the same device that
was previously booted.

The following procedure describes how to manually update an out-of-date boot archive by using the bootadm command.

1. Become the root user.
2. To update the boot archive, type:

   # bootadm update-archive

   bootadm

   Manages the boot archives on a system.

   update-archive

   Updates the current boot archive, if required. Applies to both SPARC and x86 based systems.

3. Reboot the system.

   # reboot