Patch Corner: Patch news and best practice

Thanks to my colleague Enda O'Connor, who has made p7zip available for Solaris 8 SPARC, it's now possible to upgrade directly from Solaris 8 SPARC to the latest Solaris 10 Update releases such as Solaris 10 5/08 and Solaris 10 10/08.  See http://sunsolve.sun.com/search/document.do?assetkey=1-9-250526-1 and http://sunsolve.sun.com/search/document.do?assetkey=1-61-72099-1 for details.

Previously, due to the lack of p7zip on Solaris 8, customers needed to perform an interim upgrade to Solaris 9 or an earlier Solaris 10 release before upgrading to the latest Solaris 10 release.

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.