Booting From a ZFS Root File System on a SPARC Based System

On a system with multiple ZFS BEs, you can boot from any BE by using the beadm activate command. Both the installation process and the beadm activation process automatically set the bootfs property.

By default, the bootfs property identifies the bootable file system entry in the /pool-name/boot/menu.lst file. However, a menu.lst entry can contain a bootfs command that specifies an alternate file system in the pool. Thus, the menu.lst file can contain entries for multiple root file systems within the pool.

When a ZFS root file system is installed, an entry similar to the following example is added to the menu.lst file:

title release-version SPARC
bootfs rpool/ROOT/solaris

When a new BE is created, the menu.lst file is updated automatically.

title release-version SPARC
bootfs rpool/ROOT/solaris
title solaris
bootfs rpool/ROOT/solaris2