About Shutting Down, Halting, Rebooting, and Uninstalling Zones

This section provides an overview of the procedures for halting, rebooting, uninstalling, and cloning zones.

Shutting Down a Zone

The zoneadm shutdown c command is used to cleanly shut down a zone. The action is equivalent to running /usr/sbin/init 0 in the zone. If the -r option is also specified, the zone is then rebooted. See Zone Boot Arguments for supported boot options.

The svc:/system/zones service uses the zoneadm shutdown to cleanly shut down zones when the global zone shuts down.

The shutdown subcommand waits until the zone is successfully shut down. If the action doesn't complete within a reasonable amount of time, zoneadm halt can then be used to forcibly halt the zone. See How to Halt a Zone.

Halting a Zone

The zoneadm halt command is used to terminate all processes running in a zone and remove the virtual platform. The zone is then brought back to the installed state. All processes are killed, devices are unconfigured, network interfaces are destroyed, file systems are unmounted, and the kernel data structures are destroyed.

The halt command does not run any shutdown scripts within the zone. To shut down a zone, see Shutting Down a Zone. Alternatively, you can log in to the zone and run shutdown. See How to Use zlogin to Shut Down a Zone.

If the halt operation fails, see Zone Does Not Halt.

Rebooting a Zone

The zoneadm reboot command is used to reboot a zone. The zone is halted and then booted again. The zone ID will change when the zone is rebooted.

Zone Boot Arguments

Zones support the following boot arguments used with the zoneadm boot and reboot commands:

• -i altinit

• -m smf_options

• -s

The following definitions apply:

-i altinit

Selects an alternative executable to be the first process. altinit must be a valid path to an executable. The default first process is described in init(1M).

-m smf_options

Controls the boot behavior of SMF. There are two categories of options, recovery options and messages options. Message options determine the type and number of messages that displays during boot. Service options determine the services that are used to boot the system.

Recovery options include the following:

debug

Prints standard per-service output and all svc.startd messages to log.

milestone=milestone

Boot to the subgraph defined by the given milestone. Legitimate milestones are none, single-user, multi-user, multi-user-server, and all.

Message options include the following:

quiet

Prints standard per-service output and error messages requiring administrative intervention

verbose

Prints standard per-service output and messages providing more information.

-s

Boots only to milestone svc:/milestone/single-user:default. This milestone is equivalent to init level s.

For usage examples, see How to Boot a Zone and How to Boot a Zone in Single-User Mode.

For information on the Oracle Solaris service management facility (SMF) and init , see Chapter 6, Managing Services (Overview), in Oracle Solaris Administration: Common Tasks, svc.startd(1M) and init(1M).

Zone autoboot Setting

To automatically boot a zone when the global zone is booted, set the autoboot resource property in a zone's configuration to true. The default setting is false.

Note that for zones to automatically boot, the zones service svc:/system/zones:default must also be enabled. This service is enabled by default.

See Zones Packaging Overview for information on the autoboot setting during pkg update.

Uninstalling a Zone

The zoneadm uninstall command is used to uninstall all of the files under the zone's root file system. Before proceeding, the command prompts you to confirm the action, unless the -F (force) option is also used. Use the uninstall command with caution, because the action is irreversible.