2009/01/19

OpenSolaris Review, Troubleshooting Tips

Trying to install OpenSolaris 2008.11 on my HP Pavillion xw8600 workstation. It's certified for solaris 10, but apparently not OpenSolaris? Has the caveat that the SATA controller must use PATA emulation as noted on the certification link.

Successfully installed 2008.5, then upgraded to latest; reboot after upgrade makes the system panic on reboot.

No luck so far with 2008.11. Kernel panics galore. Have tried passing various versions of these options to the kernel, with no luck:

disable-uhci=true (disable usb)
disable-ehci=true (made this one up, disable usb 2.0?)
acpi-user-options=2 (disable acpi, see this )
acpi-user-options=8 (run acpi in legacy mode)
use_mp=0 (disable cpu cores other than core 0)
ata-dma-enabled=0

To use the above options, modify the grub kernel line. To do that, boot the system from the cd. When the grub menu is displayed, press a key to stop the countdown. Then press "e" and "e" again to edit the kernel line of the default boot option. Append "-B" followed by a space and a comma-separated list of the above parameters. Then press "ENTER" and "b" to boot it.

To boot into single-user mode, add "-s" to the end of the kernel line.
To enable verbose output during boot (and learn what's going on), add "-v" to the end of the kernel line.
To enable verbose output from SMF ("Service Management Facility") as your services start, add "-m verbose" to the end of the kernel line.

Debugger tips
To enter the debugger, add "-kdv" to the end of the kernel line
use_mp/W 0 :c (to disable multi-processor)
moddebug/W 80000000 (to print debug info from each module that loads)
:c - continue boot (or reboot if it's panicked)
$C prints a stack backtrace.
::msgbuf - print the console messages
::status - the state of the machine
::stack - print the stack
::modinfo - display info on loaded modules
::findstack


example for how to debug a core file: mdb -k unix.0 vmcore.0
::panicinfo
see dumpadm man page

Network Configuration
edit nwam config
vi /etc/nwam/llp
disable nwam (network automagic configurer)
svcadm disable svc:/network/physical:nwam
enable default network config-ability
svcadm enable svc:/network/physical:default

see if the network interface device driver is installed by doing ifconfig -a -- you should see some interfaces other than lo0
If it's not loaded, then do "ifconfig bge0 plumb" to enable the module, where bge0 is replaced by the correct device name for your driver.

Once it's loaded, you can do
ifconfig bge0 dhcp
to configure the interface for dhcp, or
ifconfig bge0 /
ifconfig bge0 up
route add default
default router config file: /etc/defaultrouter
...then, edit /etc/resolv.conf to list your dns servers, e.g.
nameserver 10.0.0.5
nameserver 10.0.0.6
edit /etc/hostname. to set the hostname, or sys-unconfig

Working with Services
svcs -a (list all services and states)


Package Management Tips
see http://opensolaris.org/os/project/pkg/
find a package, e.g.:
pkg search java
install a package
pkg install
e.g.,
pfexec pkg install SUNWjre-config-plugin

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