Re: [pca] Changes in Recommended OS Cluster

[Don O'Malley]

Hi Martin/All, I wasn't expecting the new look Recommended Patchsets to hit the shelves until this evening, so apologies for the delay in giving you a heads-up on this. A couple of changes have been made to the old Recommended Patch Clusters: 1) We've rebranded the old Recommended "Patch Clusters" as Recommended "Patchsets" 2) We've added additional patches to the new patchset To go into a bit more detail... 1) above is purely a cosmetic change to integrate with Oracle's standard terminology. In Oracle they refer to what we previously called "clusters" as "patchsets", hence the name change. In relation to 2). Yes, we have brought some additional patches into the new Recommended Patchset. This is a result of months of work research involving my team, Oracle Proactive Services and the Oracle Technical Support Center. We have as a result made process changes in generation of the patchsets. Previously, the criteria for including a patch in the Recommended patchset was very cut and dry; a patch needed to address a Sun Alert issue (i.e. Security, Data Loss or System Availability), or be required by a patch that met that criteria in order to be included in the Recommended patchset. While this was very effective at including patches that avoid systems hitting critical issues, there was still a gap... Often there are cases where a patch does not meet the Sun Alert criteria, but yet provides a significant advantage to customers if installed. An example of this might be a specific network driver that, when installed, significantly improves network performance. In order to bridge this gap, the criteria for inclusion in the new Recommended patchsets has been extended. Now Engineers working on the "cold face" of customer issues in both the Oracle Technical Support Center and in Oracle Proactive Services can leverage the experience they gain from solving customer issues, by feeding back information on specific patches that they recommend be included in the Recommended Patchsets. While it may seem like we've added a large number of patches to the cluster, please bear in mind that we have applied the new process all the way back as far as S10 FCS, so many of the patches that have been added to the Recommended Patchset will already be "freshbitted" in more recent Solaris Updates. I hope all of this makes sense and you too see that this is as a really big improvement in the Recommended Patchset. Gerry is on vacation at the moment, but he will be blogging about this when he's back online. All thoughts/feedback/comments are welcome! Best, -Don Martin Paul wrote: A PCA user pointed me at the README of the current "Recommended OS Patchset". Besides a cosmetic change (the term "Patch Cluster" has been replaced by "Patchset") there is this note:   The patch inclusion criteria have been extended to include patches for   selected issues identified by Oracle Proactive Services and the Oracle   Technical Support Center. When comparing yesterday's and today's patchdiag.xref, I had already noticed that there are hundreds of patches which are suddenly marked as "R" (Recommended). I guess the above note explains this. So don't be surprised when "pca -l missingr" suddenly shows a lot more patches than yesterday. Martin. -- Don O'Malley Manager, Patch System Test Revenue Product Engineering | Solaris | Hardware East Point Business Park, Dublin 3, Ireland Phone: +353 1 8199764 Team Alias: rpe_patch_system_test...@oracle.com