The Open Boot PROM(OBP) aliases in solaris SPARC environments are created to simplify the access to hardware devices using user friendly names. They can be used in place of the full OBP hardware path at the “ok” prompt. The post discusses the procedure to set the Open Boot Prom (OBP) environment for SPARC systems properly if system is mirrored with Solaris Volume Manager (SVM).
1. Identify the root disk and mirror disk
To identify the root and mirror disk used for the meta device for / (root) file system :
# df -lh / Filesystem size used avail capacity Mounted on /dev/md/dsk/d10 12G 5.1G 6.3G 45% /
Look for the mirror setup and find the submirrors constituting the mirror d10.
# metastat -p d10 d10 -m d11 d12 1 d11 1 1 c0t0d0s0 d12 1 1 c0t1d0s0
2. Identify device path of physical disk
From the output of the metastat command output get the 2 disks and find the physical device path of the disks.
# ls -l /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 47 Dec 8 2011 /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 -> ../../devices/pci@1c,600000/scsi@2/sd@0,0:a,raw # ls -l /dev/dsk/c0t1d0s0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 47 Dec 8 2011 /dev/dsk/c0t1d0s0 -> ../../devices/pci@1c,600000/scsi@2/sd@1,0:a,raw
or at OBP
ok show-disks a) /pci@1c,600000/scsi@2,1/disk b) /pci@1c,600000/scsi@2/disk
3. Setup alias at OBP
Once we know the physical path of the disks, we can set an user friendly alias name for both the root disk and mirror disk at ok prompt.
ok> nvalias rootdisk /pci@1c,600000/scsi@2/disk@0,0:a ok> nvalias rootmirror /pci@1c,600000/scsi@2/disk@1,0:a
4. Setup boot-device and diag-device in OBP
We would also need to set boot device as the 2 disk device aliases we just created to boot.
ok> setenv boot-device rootdisk rootmirror ok> printenv boot-device
Add also to diag-device ,because if diag-switch is set then diag-device is used for booting instead of boot-device variable.
ok> setenv diag-device rootdisk rootmirror
5. Try booting from each device alias
The final verification step is to try booting from each device alias we created. This also verifies that the system boots from both the submirrors of the SVM mirror.
ok> boot rootdisk # init 0 ok> boot rootmirror