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Flag day: new boot sparc - PSARC 2006/525Date: Fri, 07 Dec 2007 16:17:39 -0800 From: Jan Setje-Eilers <setje at jurassic dot eng dot sun dot com> To: on-all at eng dot sun dot com, onnv-gate at onnv dot eng dot sun dot com Subject: Flag day: new boot sparc - PSARC 2006/525 This Flag-day message is required reading for everyone who develops on SPARC or maintains a SPARC build machine. The putback of: 6521412 PSARC 2006/525: new boot sparc Brings dboot, ramdisk-based booting and the ramdisk miniroot to SPARC. The dboot and ramdisk-based booting are enabling technologies for zfs boot, fix the boot scratch memory issue once and for all, and with modern HBAs boot significantly faster. The ramdisk miniroot unifies the miniroot for CD, DVD, net and wanboot installs. It saves ~70Mb on the first CD. It does not (and never intended to) deliver GRUB on SPARC. OBP continues to be used to select boot options, the boot device and file to boot. Information for all developers ------------------------------ BFU has been updated to support new boot sparc. You must use an updated BFU from the gate as of this putback. BFU'ing backwards from these bits works for us, but is subject to the usual caveat that doing so is never supported. Cap-Eye Install should not be used across this putback. Users do so at their own risk. Use of Cap-Eye Install after a BFU or upgrade will work as it does on x86 today. Install will now include the Installed kernel in filelist.ramdisk in /etc/boot/solaris so that the Installed kernel is included in the boot_archive. Information for build machine maintainers ----------------------------------------- BFU constructs a new generic.boot cpio archive on sparc. You must either build with the 't' flag or update SUNWonbld (specifically mkbfu) after the nightly is built to be able to create this archive. A build of a new boot sparc workspace with an older mkbfu will result in cpio archives which do not boot. Additional information ---------------------- The stand-alone failsafe can be booted by running boot -F failsafe at the ok prompt. The failsafe runs entirely out of the ram-based disk image and can be used to repair an inconsistent boot-archive or some other damage. BFU has been updated to install a known working failsafe archive on the first BFU of a set of new boot sparc archives. The ramdisk based miniroot is packed and unpacked with root_archive(1m). Only a new-boot sparc system can pack or unpack the compressed version of the miniroot. If pack is run on a pre new-boot sparc system, it will produce an uncompressed image which will work as long as the systems loading it have sufficient memory to load and run from the larger ramdisk. Boot performance: New boot sparc changes the workload performed during boot. Rather than reading bits and pieces during boot, a single larger boot_archive is loaded and then booted. Some HBA firmware does a better job of loading a large chunk of data (the boot_archive) from disk than others. In short, mpt and fas are now faster, qlc is neutral, glm and isp are slower and ide depends on the drive speed. Any bugs should be filed under solaris/kernel/boot. We can be contacted via nb-sparc at sun dot com . - The new-boot SPARC team |