Welcome to the Patching Documentation Center

This page provides the latest information on patching. See the How To and Resources tabs for all our patching documentation for both beginners and advanced students of patching.

To get started, see these documents:

• FAQs:
  • Patching for the Solaris OS - Read article
  • Ask the Expert - online question and answer session about patching issues. See the XPerts page for session transcripts.
• Overview of Patch Types and Dependencies
  Definitions of patch types are provided, as well as a review of the basic interrelationships between patches - Read article
• A Bug's Lifecyle
  An overview of how a bug becomes a patch - Read article

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Sun Connection (Patch Management)
To automate your patching, register your gear at Sun Connection.

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What's New in Patching

Deferred Activation Patching

Patch utillities have been improved to better handle the large scope of change delivered in feature patches, such as Kernel patches. Use Solaris Live Upgrade to patch a copy of the original boot environment to minimize downtime and reduce risk by providing fallback capability if needed. However, for customers patching a live partition, Sun has implemented the deferred-activation patching enhancement. Deferred-activation patching ensures system consistency during the patching process. This modification affects how these patches are installed on any Solaris 10 release.

See What's new in patching the Solaris OS?

OpenSolaris Image Packaging System

Do you want to see how future patch architecture is changing?

• The new OpenSolaris 2008.05 release is available.
• From the architect, Stephen Hahn, a summary of how Indiana's Image Packaging System (IPS) changes patching: summary
• OpenSolaris Image Packaging System project page
• OpenSolaris Image Packaging System documentation

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