I decide to drop few words here about dramatic change introduced in Solaris10 FCS in patching. It is almost two years as it was introduced - I have some kind of anniversary here... ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It is not new technology - [b]"Real multiple patch handling"[/b] was introduced as a side effect of zone patching in Solaris10 FCS and went almost unnoticed. However this change take huge amount of headache for all IT departments of big companies who have to regularly patch their Solaris systems (and this is what they only doing with Solaris), because it eliminates ridiculous requirement to list all patches you need to install in right order - now patchadd (pdo - actually) do it itself. Ordering patches is quite complicated thing to do manually by customers, especially with all this obsoleted patches and different reviions, but it may be automated by Sun if we are holder of this technology and know how this all works. This was done for S10FCS. It was most difficult part of IT job in patching - to determine the right order of preselected patches, which big company have to verify before deployment and came up with their own patchlists. In general entire dependency check was reimplemented in C using proprietary hashtable as well as prelinked datastructure which keep all relation between patches in tree and so allow recursive check algorithms to be used. It is instantly bust performance of this part of patching - I had no time to do real check (it was side effect of zone patching - my job was to make it works with zones), but I guess it was 100 times or more. Before all patch dependency were analyzed by kshell script using awk, grep etc - so it is pretty obvious that specially tuned for patchid hashfunction implemented on C beats it easy and is faster 100 times or more. But most important was that it analyze all patches requested to install at once not one by one sequentially as it was before - even you can specify several patches in command line inside kshell script it was a loop which patch them one by one. This require patches to be patched in right order - in command line you had to list them in the right order! This requirement also prevents patching from directory using all patches presented - to resolve ordering issue patch_order file was supplied with new patch-clusters. Now from Solaris 10 FCS 1. Patches in command line can be listed in any order. 2. You may patch from directory (-M option) without listing patches. Now with new project - "Recursive patching" this also will work over "http" and "https", not only local directory. vassun This message posted from opensolaris.org
