[OpenIndiana-discuss] Boot failure on Hipster upgrade

[Nikola M]

On 09/20/17 11:15 PM, Gary Mills wrote:
> What would have caused this behavior?  What can I do now to enable the
> upgrade to work, or even to debug the problem further?

Maybe you could firstly define what are osnet-incorporation and 
userland-incorporation versions you have on your working BE , then you 
can try to update to some of osnet/userland combinations (you can match 
them by searching with advanced search on pkg.openindiana.org/hipster).

All that in a hope that the change that affects you started somewhere 
after 201705 and before present day, so that change that affects you can 
be identified.
/hipste package states are not kept , not even for hipster snapshots, 
when ISOs are made, and states of packages in between snapshots are 
deleted when snapshots are created, to conserve space and to have more 
sane IPS package manager performance on update.

Only way to keep quality higher is to update more often and to report 
bugs (thank you for reporting),
right after problem occurs. That way it can be fixed earlier and not 
waiting a year to be reported and fixed.

I suggest moving to illumos loader instead of GRUB, and MATE instead of 
GNOME, e.g. doing fresh install and then update of the newest snapshot 
that can boot and install.
Check also if there is legacy hardware support turned on in BIOS.

Other then reinstalling, trying other/newer Openindiana snapshot and 
crawler-updating to figure out when problem started to appear, one can 
also try running newest OI that works and then try to compile and 
install newer illumos/osnet-incorporation and also see when problem 
appears first.

For instance I have C2Duo laptop with some strange problem that locks 
down random processes with high cpu usage, and problem started somewhere 
fom january till March. And only way is to recompile illumos to see when 
was the first time problem appeared. (During that time i used to use the 
other machine). And if that is not both cached and fixed on time, before 
October Openindiana snapshot, bug will be there for the next year too.

So there is no substitution for the 'crew' that is updating frequently 
and report bugs often and early and try to solve them, to be able to 
have quality better for those who update not that often and expect 
everything to work.