Solaris Verbose Booting

When you are sitting around waiting on Solaris to boot it is helpful to know what it is doing instead of staring at a blinking cursor.

I found it helpful to turn on some verbose debugging options during boot. I also added the -k for the debugger which takes almost no resources and can be helpful when there is a hang.


You can either add these to /boot/grub/menu.1st, or edit the grub entry when it boots.

Here is the new multiboot line:

Serial:
kernel /platform/i86pc/multiboot -B console=ttya -k -v -m verbose

VGA/Text:
kernel /platform/i86pc/multiboot -B console=text -k -v -m verbose

In 10u6 it displays a nice countdown of ZFS filesystems getting mounted which is a HUGE win!

Be ready though, it will throw a lot of information at you, in particular, it will dump a lot of information about each disk.