When using more than one CPU, Oracle Solaris 10 10/08, and Oracle Solaris 10 5/09 may take a long time to boot and may print warnings on the system console regarding failures to read from disk. This is a bug in Oracle Solaris 10 which affects specific physical and virtual configurations. It is caused by trying to read microcode updates from the boot disk when the disk interrupt is reassigned to a not yet fully initialized secondary CPU. Disk reads will time out and fail, triggering delays of about 45 seconds and warnings.

The recommended solution is upgrading to at least Oracle Solaris 10 10/09 which includes a fix for this problem. Alternative solutions include restricting the number of virtual CPUs to one or possibly using a different storage controller.

Solaris releases before Solaris 10 1/06, including Solaris 9, Solaris 10 1/05 (GA), and Solaris 10 3/05 (HW2), are unable to communicate through the Intel E1000 card. The Solaris e1000g driver does not enable PCI bus mastering for the network adapter and is therefore unable to send and receive data. This problem appears to be specific to the e1000g driver and does not reflect general Solaris driver behavior.

The AMD PCnet emulation (using the Solaris pcn driver) can be used instead of Intel E1000. Solaris 10 1/06 (U1) and later releases do not have this problem and work with the emulated E1000 ethernet controller.