Wednesday Sep 09, 2009

I am delighted to announce that Casper Dik's "Turbo-Charging SVR4 Package Install" feature enhancement is now available by downloading and installing the following patches:

119254-70 (SPARC) / 119255-70 (x86): Patch utilites patch
121428-13 (SPARC) / 121429-13 (x86): Live Upgrade Zones Support Patch
121430-40 (SPARC) / 121431-41 (x86): Live Upgrade Patch
124630-28 (SPARC) / 124631-29 (x86): System Administration Applications, Network, and Core Libraries Patch

It is important to apply 119254-70 (SPARC) / 119255-70 (x86) and 121428-13 (SPARC) / 121428-13 (x86) if the system is running non-global zones.  Otherwise booting newly installed zones will fail until the pkgserv daemon exits, about 5 minutes after zoneadm install finished.  Zones which were already installed can be booted as expected.

"Turbo Packaging" is designed to dramatically improve the performance of install, upgrade, Live Upgrade, and zone creation on Solaris 10.  It delivers only a small improvement for patching performance.   (See my Zones Parallel Patching blog entry for information on dramatic patching performance improvements.)

For background reading on the "Turbo Packaging" feature, please see
http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?messageID=358081 and http://arc.opensolaris.org/caselog/PSARC/2009/173/

The "Turbo-charging SVR4 Package Install" feature will also be included in the forthcoming Solaris 10 Update 8 release and will be documented in the Release Notes for that release.

Great work, Casper - well done!

This blog copyright 2009 by Gerry Haskins