Opensolaris BFU – Some Notes

Some notes for doing a BFU in Opensolaris. I find the best way to try a BFU is by combining with a Live Updated slice then can be a useful way for testing new functionality while still keeping the existing system as a fall back. The information below is summarised from Ben Rockwood and Omer Faruk Sen.

BFU: Blindingly Fast Update or Bonwick/Faulkner Update (or sometimes called as Big F* Update) which is a set of cpio archives that directly installs contents of cpio to / without UPDATING package database. So it will break pkg environment and you can’t and shouldn’t use patch* or pkg* commands because you get LOTS of mismatched md5sums.

First thing is to download, unpack and install the build tools and current BFU archive from the opensolaris site. At this point you are looking for SUNWonbld-20070409.i386.tar.bz2 and on-bfu-20070409.i386.tar.bz2.

zfs create ztank/bfu
cd /ztank/bfu/
bzcat SUNWonbld-20070409.i386.tar.bz2 | tar xf -
cd onbld/
pkgadd -d . SUNWonbld
cd ..
bzcat on-bfu-20070409.i386.tar.bz2 | tar xf -

Then run the BFU tool:

export FASTFS=/opt/onbld/bin/i386/fastfs
export BFULD=/opt/onbld/bin/i386/bfuld
export GZIPBIN=/usr/bin/gzip
export PATH=/opt/onbld/bin:/opt/onbld/bin/i386:$PATH
bfu /ztank/bfu/archives-20070409/i386/

Finally at the bfu# prompt run the ACR (Automatic Conflict Resolution) tool:


bfu# /opt/onbld/bin/acr

After that is complete you should check in /bfu.conflicts/ to see if there are any files that the ACR missed. Then reboot with:

sync;sync;sync;shutdown -y -g0 -i6

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