Upgrading a Boot Environment

The OpenSolaris 2008.05 release enables you to upgrade an installed boot environment (BE) by using the Image Packaging System.

Note - This section describes how to upgrade an installed OpenSolaris 2008.05 release with new and revised packages as they become available. Do not use this procedure to upgrade the OpenSolaris Developer Preview 2 release. Instead, see Upgrading from OpenSolaris Preview 2 to OpenSolaris 2008.05.

For the OpenSolaris 2008.05 release, use the pkg image-update command to update all installed packages in the current image to the latest available version.

Syntax: pkg image-update [-nv]

The pkg image-update command upgrades all installed packages in the current boot environment to their latest available version. With the -n option, the command executes, but makes no persistent changes to the image. With the -v option, progress messages are displayed during the operation.

In the OpenSolaris 2008.05 release, the upgrade process has been enhanced. In this release, the upgrade process automatically creates a clone: a new, bootable BE. The upgrade process applies the upgrade changes to the clone instead of to the original BE. After successfully completing the changes to the clone and rebooting the system, the upgraded clone is provided as the default, active BE in the GRUB menu. The original BE remains on the GRUB menu as an alternate selection.

Note - A clone of the boot environment includes everything hierarchically under the main root dataset of the original boot environment. Shared file systems are not under the root dataset and are not cloned. Instead, the boot environment accesses the original shared file systems.

After upgrading your system, you can use the beadm list command to see a list of the boot environments on the system, including the new BE created by the pkg image-update command. See the following example.

os# pkg image-update
A clone of opensolaris exists and has been updated and activated. 
On next boot the Boot Environment opensolaris-1 will be mounted on '/'. 
Reboot when ready to switch to this updated BE.

os# beadm list

BE            Active Active on Mountpoint Space
Name                 reboot               Used
----          ------ --------- ---------- -----
opensolaris   yes    no        legacy     57.5K
opensolaris-1 no     yes       -          2.59G

In this example, the initial boot environment created by the installer is named “opensolaris.” The boot environment created by the pkg image-update command is automatically named “opensolaris-1.”

After rebooting to the upgraded boot environment, any inactive boot environment can be destroyed to save space by running the beadm destroy command. For instructions, see How to Destroy an Existing BE.

For further information about the pkg command, see Image Packaging System Documentation and the pkg(1) man page.

Updating Specific Packages

As an alternative to upgrading your entire BE, you can update specific installed packages or package groups in the active BE by using the pkg install command. The pkg install command automatically checks for newer versions of specific packages or package groups, and installs them if they are available. Any dependent packages are also automatically updated.

For further information about updating specific packages, see Image Packaging System Documentation and the pkg(1) man page.