Patch Corner: Patch news and best practice

My colleague, Damien Farnham, from the Performance Regression Benchmarking team, has written an informative blog posting on why it is increasingly important to keep SPARC firmware up to date (similar to the importance of keeping x86/x64 firmware up to date).  A lot has changed since the humble OBP!

Please see Best Practise In Firmware Patching for the T1000/T2000/T5X20 platforms.

And he's now added an entry for x86 Firmware too.

See also the Firmware section on the Big Admin Patching Hub, especially the FAQ.

One area you may not be aware of is that upgrading Firmware can lead to significant performance improvements in certain circumstances.

It's important to consider Firmware patches when considering an appropriate patching strategy for your systems.

In this regard, there's a new Firmware patching tab on BigAdmin which you may find useful, http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/patches/firmware/

Firmware issues are notoriously difficult to diagnose, so keeping up to date with firmware patches is a good preventative measure.  Also, firmware patches also occasionally deliver support for new features, such as LDoms (on appropriate hardware).

Due to the nature of what they deliver, firmware 'patches' are not standard patches applicable using patchadd.  Users must follow the install instructions in the patch README.