OpenSolaris

Heads Up: use gate's bfu on sparc zfs-root machines

Date: Mon, 07 Jul 2008 17:12:08 -0700
From: George Wilson <George.Wilson at sun dot com>
To: on-all at eng dot sun dot com, onnv-gate at onnv dot sfbay dot sun dot com
Subject: Heads Up: use gate's bfu on sparc zfs-root machines

If you use BFU on an sparc machine with ZFS root, be sure to use the
latest version of BFU which includes the fix for '6680633 zfs SPARC disk
layout causes boot header and bootblk to claim blocks 15-31'.

If you don't use the latest BFU, be sure to run '/usr/sbin/installboot
-F zfs /platform/`uname -m`/lib/fs/zfs/bootblk <physical device>' once
bfu completes and prior to rebooting.

Details:

My putback for '6680633 zfs SPARC disk layout causes boot header and
bootblk to claim blocks 15-31' fixes the location of the zfs bootblk and
as a result requires the use of the latest version of BFU.

This putback breaks apart the zfs boot block and stores the first part
in the first 7.5K of the disk and the remaining portion in the ZFS
designated boot block region at offset 512K. The latest gate version of
BFU handles this restructuring correctly.

If you don't use the latest BFU, be sure to run '/usr/sbin/installboot
-F zfs /platform/`uname -m`/lib/fs/zfs/bootblk <physical device>' prior
to rebooting.

Failure to do either of these prevent the system from booting with a
message indicating "The file just loaded does not appear to be executable."

To recover from this you will need to boot off the net and use the root
disk's image of 'installboot' to install the bootblk in the correct
locations.

Thanks,
George