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last updated on 2009-12-10

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 Solaris users with various levels of patching experience.

Patching Quick Links

Patching With Solaris Live Upgrade: Process Flowchart

5 Things You Must Do Before Patching

Follow the steps below to complete five essential tasks before trying to patch your Solaris system.

Step 1: Learn why you should patch your Solaris system
Step 2: Determine when you need to install a patch
Step 3: Find out which patches you should install
Step 4: Learn how to install a patch
Step 5: Know what to do if something goes wrong

Need A Patch?

Find specific patches at SunSolve. The SunSolve Patch Page provides all the patches for your specific system configuration.

What's New In Patching?

New: Solaris 10 10/09 Patch Bundle
New Patching Features in the Solaris 10 10/09 Release
Patching the Solaris OS Using Sun Ops Center 2.5
Contract Customer Patch Forums on forums.sun.com.
Major PatchFinder enhancements available now
From Sun BluePrints: Maintaining Solaris with Live Upgrade and Update On Attach (Registration required)
New Zones Parallel Patching Feature
Solaris 10 5/09 Patch Bundle
New PatchFinder Tool Now Available
Jeff Victor's Blog: Patching Zones Goes Zoom!
Solaris Patch Presentation in Patch Corner Blog
Cannot patch Solaris 10 from Solaris 8 or 9 OS
Use Solaris Live Upgrade to Upgrade From Solaris 8 to Solaris 10
Solaris Patch Policy Entitlement Implementation Changes
- Explanation: See Gerry's blog
- Read the Offical Patch Policy

Find Training

New to Solaris? These videos from Sun Training provide an easy introduction to patching.

Sun's Patching Philosophy

Patching Best Practices

For more information, see the Sun Training Center.

BigAdmin Patch-Related Articles

Find Support

There are lots of ways to find support for your Solaris system. See the support menu at the top of the page.

Register Your Gear

To automate your patching, register your gear at either:

Sun xVM Ops Center
For Sun Connection: Sun Inventory.

OpenSolaris Image Packaging System

Do you want to see how future patch architecture is changing? The Image Packaging System, pkg(5), is a framework that provides for software lifecycle management such as installation, upgrade, and removal of packages.

From the architect, Stephen Hahn, a summary of how Indiana's Image Packaging System (IPS) changes patching:

The packaging design I'm working on has support for management of "images", which are a combination of the basic idea of a boot environment with some amount of linkage or sharing, as in zones. The system allows various upgrade paths to be restricted, so that you can be on a "fixes only" branch, on a "features and fixes" branch, or on the developer release. You could, in principle, freeze or pin a subset of the packages, and the system would work out what packages would still work given those fixed versions, but we will probably encourage use of some metacluster-like group packages. On the equivalent of patching, the idea is that new branches of the existing repositories would be created for each of the affected packages.

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