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.

Sun x4500 and Harddrive firmware patches

If you have a x4500 ( Thumper ) with the 500g disks, make sure you install patch number 140576-03.

140576-03 sata firmware patch for 500gb Hitachi Drives

It only affects the following drives:

Disk Drive HDS725050KLA360, 500.0GB (Sun model number HDS7250SASUN500G) without disk firmware revision AV0A

The patch requires a reboot where it will go through disk by disk and install the firmware. With 48 disks, expect it to take a while.


Also install the latest Solaris patches and firmware for the x4500 which is 1.6 as of today.

Sun x4500 and firmware

I ran across a number of issues with 10u6 and the x4500 ( Thumper ) especially with their Marvell drivers. In particular you have to make sure you are running the latest and greatest firmware and have all of the latest kernel and driver patches. When you install the latest firmware Sun recommends doing a clean install of Solaris so that the disks get numbered correctly. What you will find is that c3's can become c5's and c5's can become c3's. It only happens on the "boot drives" in the x4500's. I did a Live Upgrade flar install with the new firmware and Solaris figured out the drive ordering with no problems.