Oracle^® Solaris 11.4 Release Notes

Installation Considerations

This section provides information for installing Oracle Solaris 11.4.

System Requirements for Installing Oracle Solaris 11.4

This section provides memory and disk space requirements for installing Oracle Solaris 11.4.

Oracle Solaris provides several system installation group packages. The text installer and the default AI manifest in an Automated Installer installation install the solaris-large-server group package. The default installation manifest for non-global zones installs the solaris-small-server group package. The solaris-minimal-server group package installs the minimum supported set of packages required to run Oracle Solaris. You might want to modify a default installation manifest to install solaris-minimal-server, and then install additional packages as needed.

The recommended minimum system memory is 4 GB.

The following table shows the recommended minimum disk space for each system installation package group.

Platform Support

Oracle Solaris 11.4 supports systems based on the Oracle SPARC T4 or later processors; the Fujitsu SPARC64 X, X+, or XII processors; or x64 CPUs supporting either the Intel EM64T or AMD AMD64 instruction sets.

You will not be able to upgrade to Oracle Solaris 11.4 on any of the following platforms. See Oracle Solaris 11.3 Support (Doc ID 2382427.1) for information about keeping these systems up to date with critical fixes for Oracle Solaris 11.3 until you can upgrade the hardware:

• SPARC Enterprise M3000, M4000, M5000, M8000, and M9000 systems that use SPARC64 VI, VII, or VII+ CPUs.

• Platforms based on UltraSPARC T1 CPUs - Sun Fire T1000 and T2000, Sun SPARC Enterprise T1000 and T2000, Netra CP3060, Netra T2000, and Sun Blade T6300

• Platforms based on UltraSPARC T2 CPUs - Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 and T5220, Sun Blade T6230, Netra CP3260, and Netra T5220

• Platforms based on UltraSPARC T2+ CPUs: Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140, T5240 and T5440, Sun Blade T6340, Sun Netra T6340, and Netra T5440

• Platforms based on SPARC T3 CPUs: SPARC T3-1, T3-1B, T3-2 and T3-4, Netra SPARC T3-1, and Netra SPARC T3-1BA

• Sun Java Workstation models: W1100z, W2100z

• Sun Ultra Workstation models: 20, 20 M2, 40, 40 M2

• Sun Fire server models: V20z, V40z, X2100, X2100 M2, X2200 M2, X4100, X4100 M2, X4140, X4200, X4200 M2, X4240, X4440, X4540, X4600, X4600 M2, X4640

• Sun Blade server modules: X6220, X6240, X6440, X8400, X8420, X8440

• Netra X4200 M2

Some capabilities that were available in Oracle Solaris 11.3 and earlier releases are now obsolete and have been removed from Oracle Solaris 11.4. An upgrade to Oracle Solaris 11.4 will remove any obsolete capabilities that are currently installed on the system. For example, drivers for some legacy devices have been deprecated in Oracle Solaris 11.4. If you upgrade systems with these devices, you might lose the ability to access those devices from Oracle Solaris 11.4. Before you upgrade, review the End of Feature Notices for Oracle Solaris 11.

For information about supported systems and implementation differences between platform types, see Oracle Solaris 11 Hardware Compatibility List.

Oracle recommends updating your system firmware to the latest available prior to installation of Oracle Solaris 11.4. See Firmware Downloads and Release History for Oracle Systems.

SPARC: Legacy Systems Require Firmware Update to Support Oracle Solaris Kernel Zones

Although Oracle SPARC T4, SPARC T5, SPARC M5, SPARC M6, and Fujitsu SPARC M10 systems were released with firmware versions to boot Oracle Solaris 11.4, the firmware must be updated if Oracle Solaris kernel zones support is required. Oracle SPARC M7, SPARC M8, SPARC T7, and SPARC T8 systems do not require firmware updates to support kernel zones on Oracle Solaris 11.4.

For information about hardware and software requirements for kernel zones, see Software and Hardware Requirements for Oracle Solaris Kernel Zones in Creating and Using Oracle Solaris Kernel Zones.

Installing Oracle Solaris 11.4

The instructions in this section are for a fresh installation. If you are updating an older Oracle Solaris 11 installation, see Updating Your Operating System to Oracle Solaris 11.4.

For a fresh installation, go to the Oracle Solaris 11 - Downloads site to accept the license and download one of the Oracle Solaris 11.4 installation images.

To install Oracle Solaris 11.4, see the following installation guides:

• Automatically Installing Oracle Solaris 11.4 Systems

• Manually Installing an Oracle Solaris 11.4 System

Use one of the following methods to access additional Oracle Solaris 11.4 packages:

• Download the Oracle Solaris 11.4 package repository file.

  Go to the Oracle Solaris 11 - Downloads site to download the Oracle Solaris 11.4 package repository file.

  See Creating Package Repositories in Oracle Solaris 11.4 for information about downloading and installing a local package repository, configuring the solaris publisher to use the local repository, and providing access to the local repository from other systems.

• Use the pkg.oracle.com/solaris/support or pkg.oracle.com/solaris/release package repository.

  If you add packages as part of the installation, use the key and cert elements of the credentials element in the installation manifest.

setterm Is Not Automatically Installed

Starting with Oracle Solaris 11.2, setterm is no longer installed as part of the system/locale/extra package.

To get setterm, install the system/locale/setterm package.

# pkg install system/locale/setterm

See the setterm(1) man page for information about the setterm command.