When booting a virtual machine with running Oracle Solaris 11 and configured with more than 2 virtual CPUs, the guest OS may hang. This is caused by a Solaris bug related to a change in the Xen hypervisor that was fixed in Oracle Solaris 11.2 SRU 8.4.
Workaround: To make Solaris 11 run on Oracle VM 3.3 with more than 2 virtual CPUs, either upgrade to Oracle Solaris 11.2 SRU 8.4 or above, or perform the following steps to implement a manual fix:
During the installation or first time boot up, edit the grub menu and append the
-kd
kernel boot parameter.Continue with the boot to run the Solaris kmdb. When the following screen prompt is displayed:
Welcome to kmdb [0]>
Enter the command:
cmi_no_init/W 1
Enter the following to continue the installation or system boot:
:c
After Solaris is installed and booted up, append the following line to the /etc/system file to make this change persistent across system reboot.
set cmi_no_init = 1
Bug 18547858