[OpenIndiana-discuss] Boot failure on Hipster upgrade

[James Carlson]

On 09/20/17 17:15, 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?

It's been a while since I debugged a Solaris boot hang, but the basic
scheme is to boot with kmdb enabled (-k on the kernel's command line;
possibly the "$multiboot" line in GRUB), then break into the debugger
using, I think, F1-A (hold F1 and press "A" key) or Shift-Pause/Break.
Once in the debugger, you can do $c to find out where you are right now,
and ::threadlist to print out the state of all of the kernel threads.

If you're lucky, it's obvious.  Often it's not, because there's a state
machine somewhere that's stuck, and there's no visible thread doing
anything with the stuck part.  But it's worth a try.

To do more than that requires staring at the source code and getting
practice with mdb dcmds.

-- 
James Carlson         42.703N 71.076W         <carlsonj at workingcode.com>