live upgrade rocks
Trying to build the latest tree, I ran into the problem that my build machine is downrev (its b74.) So I had to update to 77 to get the latest tree to build. For any other OS, or in past days for Solaris, this would be a major crisis, incurring numerous hours of downtime. (Or I could use bfu.) But I decided to finally try out live upgrade. I had an ISO image of b77 stored on a local zfs filesystem (along with all my critical data). When I had installed this system, I had set it up with a spare empty slice matching the / slice in size, in anticipation of one day trying out live upgrade. Boy am I glad I did. All I had to do was a few commands: # lucreate -n b77 -m /:/dev/dsk/c1t0d0s3:ufs (Wait about 20 minutes.) # lofiadm -a /data/isos/sol-nv-b77-sx86.iso # mount -F hsfs -o ro /dev/lofi/1 /mnt # luupgrade -u -n b77 -s /mnt (Wait another 20-30 minutes.) # luactivate b77 # init 6 (That last step confused me. I tried "reboot" a few times, before I actually read the output fr...