With the help of Tony and Liane, we've managed to pin-point the code in svcadm which caused the failure in the call to"svcadm enable -ts datalink-management" in net-physical. The svcadm command fails, but actually succeeds in enabling the service which comes on line anyway prior to manifest-import. The svcadm command just gives up waiting for it to be online due to some excessively sensitive code in inst_get_state() (called by wait_fmri_enabled()).
Placing a short loop after the svcadm call which waits for the service to get enabled works to confirm this issue, but is obviously not a final fix. Tony is currently looking at a proper fix to svcadm. -Seb
