x86: Troubleshooting Issues With Fast Reboot

The following sections describe how to identify and resolve some common issues that you might encounter with the Fast Reboot feature of Oracle Solaris on x86 platforms.

The following information is provided in this section:

• x86: Debugging Early Panics That Might Occur

• x86: Conditions Under Which Fast Reboot Might Not Work

If you need to manually update the Oracle Solaris boot archive on an x86 based system that does not support the Fast Reboot feature, see x86: How to Clear a Failed Automatic Boot Archive Update on a System That Does Not Support Fast Reboot.

x86: Debugging Early Panics That Might Occur

Because the boot-config service has dependencies on the multiuser milestone, users who need to debug early panics can patch a global variable, fastreboot_onpanic in the /etc/system file, as shown in the following example:

# echo "set fastreboot_onpanic=1" >> /etc/system
# echo "fastreboot_onpanic/W" | mdb -kw

x86: Conditions Under Which Fast Reboot Might Not Work

The following are possible conditions under which the Fast Reboot feature might not work:

• GRUB configuration cannot be processed.

• The driver does not implement the quiesce function.

  If you attempt a fast reboot of a system with an unsupported driver, a message similar to the following is displayed:

  Sep 18 13:19:12 too-cool genunix: WARNING: nvidia has no quiesce()
  reboot: not all drivers have implemented quiesce(9E)

  If the driver for the network interface card (NIC) does not implement the quiesce function, you can attempt to unplumb the interface first, then retry a fast reboot of the system.

• There is insufficient memory.

  If there is not enough memory on the system, or not enough free memory to load the new kernel and the boot archive, the fast reboot attempt fails with the following messages, then falls back to a regular reboot:

  Fastboot: Couldn't allocate size below PA 1G to do fast reboot
  Fastboot: Couldn't allocate size below PA 64G to do fast reboot

• The environment is unsupported.

  Fast reboot functionality is not supported in the following environments:

  • An Oracle Solaris release that is running as a paravirtualized (PV) guest domain

  • Non-global zones

For more information, see the following man pages:

• reboot(1M)

• init(1M)

• quiesce(9E)

• uadmin(2)

• dev_ops(9S)