live_upgrade(5) Standards, Environments, and Macros live_upgrade(5)NAMElive_upgrade - overview of Live Upgrade feature
DESCRIPTION
The Live Upgrade feature of the Solaris operating environment enables
you to maintain multiple operating system images on a single system. An
image—called a boot environment, or BE—represents a set of operating
system and application software packages. The BEs might contain differ‐
ent operating system and/or application versions.
On a system with the Solaris Live Upgrade software, your currently
booted OS environment is referred to as your active, or current BE. You
have one active, or current BE; all others are inactive. You can per‐
form any number of modifications to inactive BEs on the same system,
then boot from one of those BEs. If there is a failure or some unde‐
sired behavior in the newly booted BE, Live Upgrade software makes it
easy for you to fall back to the previously running BE.
Live Upgrade software includes a full suite of commands, listed below
and described in individual man pages, which implement all of the Live
Upgrade features and functions.
The following are some of the tasks you can perform with Live Upgrade
software:
o You can make one or more copies of the currently running
system.
o You can upgrade to a new OS version on a second boot envi‐
ronment, then boot from that environment. If you choose, you
can then fall back to your original boot environment or boot
from yet another environment.
o You can install application or OS packages to a boot envi‐
ronment, then boot from that environment.
o You can install OS patches to a boot environment, then boot
from that environment.
o From a flash archive, you can install an OS to a boot envi‐
ronment, then boot from that environment. See flar(1M) for
information on administering flash archives.
o You can split and rejoin file systems in a new BE. For exam‐
ple, you can separate /usr, /var, and /opt from /, putting
them on their own partitions. Conversely, you could join
these file systems on a single partition under /.
o You can mount any or all of the filesystems of a BE that is
not active, compare the files in any pair of BEs, delete or
rename a BE, and perform other administrative tasks.
The Live Upgrade software supports upgrade from any valid Solaris
installation medium, including a CD-ROM, an NFS or UFS directory, or a
flash archive. (See flash_archive(4) for a description of the flash ar‐
chive feature.)
In simplest terms, a BE, for Live Upgrade, consists of the disk slice
containing a root file system and the file system/device (usually disk)
slice entries specified in vfstab(4). This set of slices is not limited
to a single disk. This means that you can have multiple BEs on a single
device, or have a BE spread across slices on multiple devices. The BE
includes any non-global zones(5) that might exist on the system as
well. If any of the non-global zones in the BE have separate file sys‐
tems, the disk slices making up these file systems are considered part
of the BE.
The minimal requirement for a Live Upgrade BE is the same as for any
Solaris boot environment: you must have root (/) and usr filesystems
(which might both reside on /). All filesystems except for /, /usr,
/var, and /opt can be shared among multiple BEs, if you choose.
Each BE must have a unique copy of the file systems that contain the
OS—/, /usr, /var, and /opt. For Live Upgrade purposes, these are
referred to as non-shareable (sometimes referred to as critical) file
systems. With other file systems, such as /export or /home, you have
the option of copying the files to a new BE or, the default, sharing
them among BEs. These are referred to as shareable file systems. A BE
is made up of a unique copy of one or more non-shareable file systems
and zero or more copies of shareable file systems.
Live Upgrade commands support an option (-X) that enables XML output.
Characteristics of the XML are specified in a DTD shipped with the
product. XML output enables programmatic parsing of portions of the
command output.
Live Upgrade supports the notion of a BE description, an optional
attribute of a BE. A BE description can be of any length and format. It
might be a text string or a binary file. See ludesc(1M) for details.
Below is an example set of steps that you might follow in the use of
Live Upgrade software. This example is by no means exhaustive of the
possibilities of the use of the Live Upgrade software.
1. You create a new BE, using lucreate(1M). The first time you
create a BE on a given system, you must designate the cur‐
rent Solaris operating environment as a BE (give it a name).
You then specify a name and a set of device (disk) slices
you want to use for the new BE. The lucreate command copies
the contents of the current Solaris operating environment
(now a BE) to the new BE.
After you have created additional BEs, you can use a BE
other than the current BE as the source for a new BE. Also,
you can create an empty BE onto which you can later install
a flash archive.
2. Using luupgrade(1M), you upgrade the OS version on your new
BE (or on yet another BE you created with lucreate). The
luupgrade enables you to upgrade an OS (from any valid
Solaris installation medium, including a flash archive), add
or remove packages (OS or application), and add or remove
patches.
3. You use luactivate(1M) to make the new BE bootable. The next
time you reboot your system, you will come up in the new BE.
4. Using lucompare(1M), you compare the system files on two
different BEs. This utility gives you a comprehensive list
of the files that have differences.
5. Using lumount(1M), you mount the filesystems of a BE that is
not active, enabling you to make changes. When you are fin‐
ished with the changes, use luumount(1M) to unmount the BE's
file systems.
6. Upon booting a new BE, you discover a failure or some other
undesirable behavior. Using the procedure specified in
luactivate, you can fall back to the previous BE.
7. Using ludelete then lucreate, you reassign file systems on
the now-deleted BE to different disk slices. You separate
/opt and /var from / on the new BE. Also, you specify that
swap be spread over slices on multiple disks.
The following is a summary of Live Upgrade commands. All commands
require root privileges.
lu FMLI-based interface for creating and administer‐
ing BEs. No longer recommended for customer use.
luactivate Designate a BE as the BE to boot from upon the
next reboot of the system.
lucancel Cancel a previously scheduled operation.
lucompare Compare the contents of two BEs.
lucreate Create a BE.
lucurr Display the name of the current BE.
ludelete Delete a BE.
ludesc Add or change BE descriptions.
lufslist List the file systems on a specified BE.
lumake Re-create a BE based on the active BE.
lumount, luumount Mount, unmount file systems of a specified BE.
lurename Rename a BE.
lustatus For all BEs on a system, report on whether a BE is
active, active upon the next reboot, in the midst
of a copy operation, and whether a copy operation
is scheduled for it.
luupgrade Upgrade an OS and install application software on
a BE. Such software includes flash archives, com‐
plete OS installations, OS and application pack‐
ages, and OS patches.
FILES
/etc/lutab list of BEs on the system
SEE ALSOluactivate(1M), lucancel(1M), lucompare(1M), lucreate(1M), lucurr(1M),
ludelete(1M), ludesc(1M), lufslist(1M), lumake(1M), lumount(1M), lure‐
name(1M), lustatus(1M), luupgrade(1M), lutab(4), zones(5)NOTES
Correct operation of Solaris Live Upgrade requires that a limited set
of patch revisions be installed for a given OS version. Before
installing or running Live Upgrade, you are required to install the
limited set of patch revisions. Make sure you have the most recently
updated patch list by consulting http://sunsolve.sun.com. Search for
the infodoc 72099 on the SunSolve web site.
It is possible for an operating system upgrade to remove installed
patches. Prior to such an upgrade, use analyze_patches, as described in
luupgrade(1M), to determine which, if any, patches will be removed.
For versions of the Solaris operating system prior to Solaris 10, Live
Upgrade supports the release it is distributed on and up to three mar‐
keting releases back. For example, if you obtained Live Upgrade with
Solaris 9 (including a Solaris 9 upgrade), that version of Live Upgrade
supports Solaris versions 2.6, Solaris 7, and Solaris 8, in addition to
Solaris 9. No version of Live Upgrade supports a Solaris version prior
to Solaris 2.6.
Starting with version 10 of the Solaris operating system, Live Upgrade
supports the release it is distributed on and up to two marketing
releases back. For example, if you obtained Live Upgrade with Solaris
10 (including a Solaris 10 upgrade), that version of Live Upgrade sup‐
ports Solaris 8 and Solaris 9, in addition to Solaris 10.
SunOS 5.10 14 Mar 2007 live_upgrade(5)
