LiveUpgrade - Booting from created disk without luactivate first?

Question

Was thinking of using one of the spare disks on my system to backup before I perform an application upgrade.
i.e. creating partitions identical to source disk (prtvtoc disk0 | fmthard - -s disk1 etc) and then using lucreate to copy onto new disk. e.g. lucreate -n newdisk -m ...........
Was then going to perform the upgrade on the original disk, leaving the newly created one alone, and only switching to it in the event of failure.
If I did this, and decided I wanted to rollback and boot from my copy, would I need to just:-
lucativate newdisk.
Or could I just boot from PROM to new disk? (i.e. boot disk1)
Does the lucreate of a system disk to another one create the necessary boot records or does luactivate need to be run to do this?

Answer 1

I think you are saying that you want to create a second boot disk for application upgrades.
Keep in my that Live Upgrade only upgrades system related file systems.
I think our recommendations would be to:
1. Create a new BE for your application upgrades and roll back to the original BE if
something goes wrong rather than create a second boot disk.
2. Use your second disk to mirror your root pool (if you haven't done this already),
if you are using ZFS and hopefully something similar if you are using UFS.
You can create a second root pool for a ZFS BE by following the steps below. I don't know
how similar steps are done for a UFS BE. And yes, you have to luactivate the new boot disk
first, but the lucreate operation seems to apply the boot blocks.
Thanks,
Cindy
1. Create a second root pool with an SMI (VTOC) labeled disk slice.
# zpool create rpool2 c1t1d0s2
2. # lustatus
Boot Environment Is Active Active Can Copy
Name Complete Now On Reboot Delete Status
s10BE yes yes yes no -
# lucreate -n s10BE2 -p rpool2
3. Set the bootfs property on the second root pool.
# zpool set bootfs=rpool2/ROOT/s10BE2 rpool2
4. Activate and boot the new BE.
# luactivate s10BE2
# init 6
5. Confirm that you are booted from the second disk:
sparc# prtconf -vp | grep bootpath
bootpath: '/pci@8,600000/SUNW,qlc@2/fp@0,0/disk@w2100002037ff9c9b,0:a'
x86# prtconf -v|sed -n '/bootpath/,/value/p'