Feathers, Rangers, and Ivory Towers

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Musings about open-source, baseball, and life as a grad student.
By: Justin R. Erenkrantz
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Fri, 04 Nov 2005

Recall this patch, Sun!

Sun Solaris/10 Intel kernel patches 118844-18 through 118844-23 blow up Solaris 10/x86. Your machine will become a brick and enter an infinite reboot loop. Lovely.

I just spent the better part of an hour dealing with Sun's idiocy. If you have a bad patch, revoke it. Don't keep allowing poor admins to come along later after you know it's broken and fall into the same trap.

Not happy at all.

Here's the workaround so that you can boot:

[...at the Solaris boot prompt; enable kmdb, debugging, and single-user
    so that you can remove the patch and reboot...]
boot -kds
[...wait for it to boot...]
physmax:w
:c
[...you'll see 'stop on write of'...]
physmax/X
[...you'll see something like the following line:

   physmax: bff7f

 this is a hex number; add one; so if you see bff7f,
 your next line will need to be bff80...]
physxmax/W bff80
:c
[...system will boot and go into single user mode...
    now, go toss those patches...]
patchrm 118844-19 120662-03 118345-12 118376-04 \
  118565-03 118886-01 119076-10 118813-01 \
  118881-02 120082-07 119851-02
shutdown -i6 -y -g0 "sun should test their patches"

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