[OmniOS-discuss] Installing non-current kernels on OmniOS r151014?

[Chris Siebenmann]

 We have a situation where we would like to be able to install new
r151014 machines with something other than the current r151014 kernel.
(In the extreme case we'd like to be able to specify the exact package
version for all packages, but kernels are the most important for us.)

 I *think* that the required older versions (both of the kernel and
of drivers) are still available in the OmniOS repository. However,
I can't seem to coax 'pkg' to show them to me (perhaps because they
differ only in the timestamp, not in the version number that pkg stuff
normally shows) and so I'm not sure I can get pkg to install them.

 In related news, is there an easy way to fish the full specific versions
of installed packages out of a non-current boot environment? (Or for
that matter from the current boot environment.)

 Is the OmniOS repo for r151014 going to keep copies of all old packages
for the lifetime of r151014, or should we also be looking into creating
our own copy of the r151014 repo so we can be sure the copies we need
are preserved?

 Thanks in advance.

(For the curious: we've been doing various testing of r151014 before
upgrading production machines to it. The August 18th and September 14th
updates were stable, but after the September 29th one our test machine
has started experiencing kernel problems. It's possible that we're
putting somewhat different test load on it, but we don't think we've
particularly changed anything. While we're going to try to get crash dumps
and so on, our first priority is stabilizing some version of r151014 for a
production upgrade, which requires being able to specifically install *it*
(at least as far as the kernel/NFS/etc goes), not 'the current r151014'.)

	- cks