SoftReboot White Paper HP Part Number: 766152-001 Published: March 2014
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Contents HP secure development lifecycle......................................................................4 About this document......................................................................................5 Intended audience....................................................................................................................5 Typographic conventions...........................................................................................................5 Executive summary........
HP secure development lifecycle Starting with HP-UX 11i v3 March 2013 update release, HP secure development lifecycle provides the ability to authenticate HP-UX software. Software delivered through this release has been digitally signed using HP's private key. You can now verify the authenticity of the software before installing the products, delivered through this release. To verify the software signatures in signed depot, the following products must be installed on your system: • B.11.31.
About this document This document discusses about the features of SoftReboot. SoftReboot solution is a feature for HP-UX 11iv3 operating system environment. Intended audience This document is intended for owners, system administrators and customers seeking information about the features of SoftReboot. Typographic conventions This document uses the following typographical conventions: IMPORTANT: This alert provides essential information to explain a concept or to complete a task.
Executive summary This white paper addresses only the following supported system configurations. Table 1 Supported system configurations Requirement Description Operating system Supported platforms SoftReboot feature is supported from HP-UX B.11.31.1109 fusion release onwards i.e. HP-UX 11iv3 operating system environment. B.11.31.1109 B.11.31.1203 B.11.31.1303 B.11.31.
1 Technologies/features SoftReboot feature reduces the operating system reboot time experienced during routine system maintenance. SoftReboot achieves this downtime reduction by skipping the platform hardware reset and booting the next kernel directly from the current operating system instance. The time saved due to SoftReboot solution varies across platforms and different hardware configurations of the same platform. Hence, the down time savings due to SoftReboot are not quantifiable.
2 Installation and uninstallation Installation 1203 To install the SoftRebootEnh bundle, perform the following steps: 1. Install the SoftRebootEnh bundle from B.11.31.1203 OE that is available electronically and on media. SoftRebootEnh bundle is available B.11.31.1203 OE onwards. 2. Verify the supported platform 3. Run swlist to verify successful installation swlist | grep SoftRebootEnh 1303 To install the SoftRebootEnh bundle, perform the following steps: 1. Install the SoftRebootEnh bundle from B.11.31.
3. USB and Graphics drivers must be disabled explicitly for the SoftReboot feature to function. • To disable USB driver, do the following: Install the Patch PHKL_43265, which disables the USB driver. To disable the USB driver, run the following command: kctune usb_disable_core=1 For more information, see the section HP Only in the Patch document.
3 Configuration and usage SoftReboot functionality requires both "rbloader" and "uxex" DLKMs to be loaded. Upon installation of the SoftReboot product, these two DLKMs are automatically configured to be loaded. Reboot and shutdown utilities have been enhanced for SoftReboot and provide a new option, "-S", to initiate a SoftReboot instead of normal reboot. SoftReboot can also be invoked as part of swinstall SD command through a new option -x softreboot.
4 Behavior and use case examples When SoftReboot feature is enabled with reboot/shutdown/swinstall options, system reboots skipping firmware reset and the next kernel is loaded directly from the current kernel instance. Due to this, the bootloader stage is completely skipped. In the current release, the next kernel configured for boot is automatically loaded. With this, the next kernel boot options cannot be specified.
5 Constraints Hardware configuration changes Primary boot path changes If the boot path is changed using setboot to a different disk, the softreboot should not be invoked. Instead normal reboot should be issued. HyperThreading settings If the hyper threading settings are changed using setboot -m ON/OFF then those settings do not take effect across a softreboot. To effect the settings, normal reboot without "-S" option should be done.
6 Troubleshooting This chapter explains some of the problem scenarios that you might encounter while working with SoftReboot. Problem On B.11.31.1403 release, if SoftReboot is used without the patch PHKL_43845 certain dumps may fail during softreboot window with an error message indicating no dump space configured. Compressed dumps may fail and fall back to uncompressed dump during softreboot. Workaround Install PHKL_43845.
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A SoftReboot Software Depot List # # # # # # # swlist -l product SoftRebootEnh Initializing... Contacting target "mdepkt5"... Target: mdepkt5:/ SoftRebootEnh B.11.31.1403 HPUX Soft Reboot SoftRebootEnh.SoftReboot B.11.31.1403 SoftReboot feature # swlist -l fileset SoftRebootEnh # Initializing... # Contacting target "mdepkt5"... # # Target: mdepkt5:/ # # SoftRebootEnh B.11.31.1403 HPUX Soft Reboot # SoftRebootEnh.SoftReboot B.11.31.1403 SoftReboot feature SoftRebootEnh.SoftReboot.SOFTREBOOT-CMD B.11.31.
B Messages during SoftReboot Diagnostics and Driver messages during SoftReboot During a softreboot the user may notice warnings or errors from the diagnostics and other I/O drivers. These messages are safe and do not affect the behavior of the next kernel booted. A typical set of messages from diagnostics driver is as follows: The diagnostic logging facility has started receiving excessive errors from the I/O subsystem.
