Flag Day of PSARC 2008/382 - Fast Reboot

Mechanisms like SMF made the boot time significantly shorter, but most people forget that a X4600 with half a terabyte of memory need quite a long time. The PSARC case “PSARC 2008/382 - Fast reboot”

The goal of the Solaris Fast Reboot project is to get to login prompt from "rebooting..." within seconds (assuming boot archive has been updated).

This is done by proving a bootloader in the kernel itself, thus you don´t have to leave the kernel and go through the chain of power on self test, BIOS and GRUB. This shaves several seconds to minutes (depending on the memory capacity of the system) from the downtime of a reboot. With this shortcut the target of “rebooting within seconds” is really realistic. Well, the code finally found it´s way to Opensolaris. It had it´s FlagDay for Build 100 yesterday evening.