James Carlson wrote: > lianep at eng.sun.com writes: >> Types of install, upgrade, and removal: >> - full OS image install/upgrade to a non-running root >> * Reboot is required before changes are active. >> * Running version of Solaris may be 2 releases less than version >> being installed. (e.g. running Solaris 10, upgrading to S12) > > Actually, it's worse than that. > > If you're doing Live Upgrade then, yes, we support two releases back, > and the implication is that the current system during the upgrade is > perhaps running S10 and modifying an image that is being upgraded to > be S12. (It's first a copy of S10, via lumake, and is upgraded in > place; so if you want to keep the repository version number the same > during the upgrade process until after the reboot, that may be > feasible.) > > However, if you're doing standard upgrade then things are a bit > different. The system boots from the miniroot, which is on the > install medium. In other words, the system is running S12 during the > upgrade process, and the image being manipulated currently has S10 in > the process of moving to S12. > > This means you're going to need a way to read and manipulate a > repository that's at least two releases old and store items in the > repository that are relevant for things at least two releases in the > future. > > There are some notable grey areas here. For instance, we don't > actually *say* that the system running the LU tools must be as new as > (or newer) than the image that's being upgraded, but that's actually > true. So, if you had a system with both S10 and S11 on it in separate > BEs, you could _not_ boot the S10 environment and try to upgrade S11 > to S12. There's no way for us to guarantee that such an operation > will work. You can use S11 to upgrade S10 to S12, and you can use S10 > to upgrade S10 to S12, but cannot upgrade newer releases. > > (It's even more strict than it appears at first glance. The same > rules go for Update releases and, more generally, with patches.) >
I think we really need to move towards a model where upgrade & patching really only adds or removes files from the system. Any other sort of manipulations in the context of the alternate OS seem fraught with hazard and difficult to test issues. - Bart -- Bart Smaalders Solaris Kernel Performance barts at cyber.eng.sun.com http://blogs.sun.com/barts
