The Zones Update on Attach Feature and Patching in the Solaris 10 OS

1. 

   Jun 22

   eoconnor says:

   Hi Just an update on another feature in Solaris that might also be of interest t...

   Hi
   Just an update on another feature in Solaris that might also be of interest to people reading this document.
   As of June 2009, non-global zones can now be patched in parallel.
   This new functionality is included in 119254-66 or 119255-66 for x86.

   Basically prior to these patch revisions, if one ran patchadd <some-patchid> on a system runnign say 4 non-global zones, then the global zone was patched first, then each non-global zone was patcehd serially, i.e. each zone was patched one after another. With revi 66 of above patches, one can now set the level pf parallisation that will be used in /etc/patch/pdo.conf, such that when the global zone has finished patching, a set number of non-global zones will be patched together ( in parallel ). This number is limited by the number of on line CPUS ( maximum number is 1.5 times the number of on line CPU's ), up to the number of actual non-global zones.

   Enda

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2. 

   Sep 17

   hirokom says:

   Hi Enda, We are now translating this article into several languages because thi...

   Hi Enda,

   We are now translating this article into several languages because this is one of the top hit BigAdmin articles in Aug. Could you please explain what the sentence below means, especially "all the patch package undo.Z packages for the package"?

   > In the case of packages that are updated, all the patch package undo.Z packages for the package are inherited from
   > the global zone into the non-global zone being attached

   Thank you in advance for your help.
   Hiroko Matano
   Globalization Program Manager, SLS

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   1. 

      Sep 18

      eoconnor says:

      Hi So basically if a package is being updated as part of update on attach say SU...

      Hi
      So basically if a package is being updated as part of update on attach say SUNWcsr in the non-global zone, and in the global zone, patch 123456-07 has been applied to SUNWcsr but currently only rev 04 has been applied to SUNWcsr in the non-global zone been attached, after attach has happened, if one was to run patchrm 123456-07 in the global zone, we would remove 123456-07 from the global zone, then log into the non-global zone that we attached earlier and try and remove 123456-07 there as well, and in order for patchrm 123456-07 to succeed in the non-global zone it must be able to find /var/sadm/pkg/SUNWcsr/save/123456-07/undo.Z inside the non-global zone while logged into the non-global zone ( not in the global zone ).

      So when we are running update on attach and and we pkgrm for instance SUNWcsr and then pkgadd SUNWcsr from the pspool in global zone, we need to also copy in the undo.Z from the global zone to the following location within the non-global zone: /var/sadm/pkg/SUNWcsr/save/123456-07/undo.Z. The undo.Z that is copied in lives in the global zone at:
      /var/sadm/pkg/SUNWcsr/save/pspool/SUNWcsr/save/123456-07/undo.Z and is created there by patchadd when 123456-07 got installed in the global zone via patchadd 123456-07.

      In the case of a heavily patched system, there might be a lot of undo.Z to copy, multiple patch id's and multiple rev's of each patch id.
      ie
      123456 rev 01, 02 and 03 might all be present and all must be copied into the attached zone if the package is being added.

      For instance on my system SUNWcsr has 149 patches applied to it:

      1. pwd
         /var/sadm/pkg/SUNWcsr/save
      2. ls ld ???? | wc -l
         149
         #

      Enda

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