Blasting fast Solaris upgrades

Been wanting to upgrade my laptop to a new OpenSolaris release for a while and decided to
try the "BFU" upgrades today. Quite impressive I must say, very smooth.

BFU stands for "blasting fast upgrade" and is more or less a bunch of cpio images and update scripts that sort things out without chewing through pkg databases and other time consuming things. It works on all modern OpenSolaris builds, I upgraded from nvr_b33 to what is b39. However, it does not include updates to JDS and other high level things. It's only the core os. The download is about 90Megs and upgrading is a piece of cake if you have ever used Unix before. If you want to stay bleeding edge with OpenSolaris, you got to live this. :)

Went to this site and downloaded the latest BFU-archive and BFU tools and ran through this quick process.

Install the BFU tools, just extract and pkgadd. The package will be installed under /opt/onbld.

Prepare the upgrade environment.

export PATH="/opt/onbld/bin/:/opt/onbld/bin/i386/:$PATH"
export FASTFS="/opt/onbld/bin/i386/fastfs"
export GZIPBIN="/usr/bin/gzip"
export BFULD="/opt/onbld/bin/`uname -p`/bfuld"

Now start the upgrade process.
This took less than 10 minutes on my 1.4Ghz/768Meg Centrino laptop.

bfu /export/share/archives-20060424/i386/

To resolve any dependencies run the "acr" tool and reboot.

/opt/onbld/bin/acr
...
reboot

I got a clean boot at first attempt, you may need to boot in single user mode and resolve any config issues.
Last thing I had to do was to upgade my ZFS pools to the latest version, done in less than a second.

root@halidell$ zpool upgrade data1
This system is currently running ZFS version 2.

Successfully upgraded 'data1' from version 1 to version 2

All done, the latest OpenSolaris system in less than 20 minutes. :)

hali@halidell$ uname -a
SunOS halidell 5.11 opensol-20060424 i86pc i386 i86pc

Oracle 10g still works without glitches, I didn't expect anything less of course. :-)

References
http://www.enderunix.org/opensolaris/docs/building_opensolaris.txt
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/onnv/devref_toc/devref_5/