LiveUpgrade 2.0

Live Upgrade / Live Update: Updating Solaris without downtime

Notes by Steve Parker, April 2004

LiveUpgrade is a Solaris feature, introduced in Solaris 8, to upgrade an OS without downtime (other than rebooting into the new OS).
It's handy, but potentially very dangerous unless you're extremely careful; here are two case studies, both with the same machine (an Ultra 10), taking a system from a Jumpstart-installed Solaris 7 8/99 to Solaris 9 8/03, via Solaris 8 10/01.
The hardware is an Ultra 10 with a single 18GB disk in a Unipack attached to c1.
Solaris 7 8/99 was installed via JET; along with the Solaris 7 filesystems, some Solaris 8 filesystems were also created in the JET config for simplicity, so we have space for Solaris 8 later.

Slice	OS	Usage	Size
0	7 (then 9)	root	12 GB
1	7 (then 9)	swap	256 MB
2	-	backup	18 GB
3	8	root	2 GB
4	8	swap	512 MB
5	7 (then 9)	var	1 GB
6	8	var	1 GB

Solaris 7 8/99 to Solaris 8 10/01

An annotated transcript of a Live Update from Solaris 7 (8/99) to Solaris 8 (10/01).
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Solaris 8 10/01 to Solaris 9 8/03

An annotated transcript of a Live Update from Solaris 8 (10/01) to Solaris 9 (8/03).
read more

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Notes

LiveUpgrade 1.0 was available with Solaris 8 FCS; by Solaris 8 10/01, this had been replaced by LiveUpgrade 2.0.
I have not done a detailed study of LiveUpgrade 1.0, but one significant difference is the lack of a "-i" flag to luupgrade. This would appear to mean that multi-CD upgrades have to be done from a Jumpstart-type image.
The LiveUpdate 1.0 syntax to upgrade to Solaris 8 is luupgrade solaris8 /path/to/Solaris_8 yes.