This problem has been solved by the valiant Solaris engineers after I had submitted it to the OpenSolaris Bugzilla service. It is bug #17465. Here I am providing, for educational purposes, an outline of what I have learned by working with the Solaris engineers on my computer problem. I am sorry if this simplistic explanation insults anyone's intelligence.
"Endless reboot" on OpenSolaris indicates kernel panic, usually caused by an incompatible driver. If an incompatible driver is loaded during boot, the kernel "panics" and restarts the computer to prevent further damage to the kernel, and so on, ad infinitum. In order to find out what driver causes the problem, one has to boot into kmdb, the Kernel Modular Debugger, which can conduct in-situ kernel debugging. You do this by altering the GRUB menu before boot. kmdb will first tell you if there is kernel panic. If there is one, it gives you a command prompt. One of the things you can do with that command prompt is capture the panic stacktrace. From the stacktrace, you will be able to tell which driver is causing the problem. Of course, you have to know your Solaris drivers to be able to do this ;-). Next, you can boot into a working boot environment, mount the faulty one and uninstall the software that contains the offending driver. In my case, it was the old VirtualBox that shipped with the laptop. Its driver, vboxdrv, was incompatible with the rest of the snv_134 kernel, so it had to be removed. Now the computer boots into snv_134 and all is well. Cheers! -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-help mailing list [email protected]
