Flash Archives and Zones

Crist Clark

2009-12-21 22:45:59 UTC

The short answer is, no, they are not compatible.

The longer answer is, it might maybe kinda work in some
circumstances if you build the flar with non-global zones
halted.

http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Community+Group+zones/flar_zones

I tried to be clever and script the process of building
a list of files for the flarcreate(1M) command to exclude
portions of running non-global zones that I didn't want
in the archive, but was not successful in even building
flars let alone testing whether they could be installed
to recreate the system.

If anyone ever figures this out or would like to details
of what I did (and did not) figure out, feel free to contact
me.

Post by Crist Clark
Are Flash Archives and non-global zones still incompatible?
This is from the "Solaris 10 Installation Guide: Solaris Flash
Archives (Creation and Installation)" book at docs.sun.com,
Caution b
A Solaris Flash archive cannot be properly created when a
non-global zone is installed. The Solaris Flash feature is
not compatible with the Solaris Zones partitioning technology.
If you create a Solaris Flash archive, the resulting archive
is not installed properly when the archive is deployed under
* The archive is created in a non-global zone
* The archive is created in a global zone that has non-global
zones installed
I've been playing with flarcreate(1M) on a "Solaris 10 8/07
s10s_u4wos_12b SPARC" box and suspect it is? I think the
flarcreate(1M) is supposed to be smart enough to ignore
volatile file systems like /proc and tmpfs(7FS) mounts, but
it doesn't seem to deal well with volatile file systems and
loopback mounts in the non-global zones.
Are there ways to work around this? Or am I going to have
to live without flars for now?