6.89 (x86 Only) Solaris 11 Guest With More Than 2 VCPUs Hangs at Boot

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:

  1. During the installation or first time boot up, edit the grub menu and append the -kd kernel boot parameter.

  2. 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
  3. 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