In general I tend to keep the defaults as much as possible.
One little thing I always like to touch is the entries' texts.
By default GRUB menu entries get the same name as a corresponding BE.
When I update a system I use specify the new version as the BE name such as:
# pkg update --be-name 11.1-7.5.0
# beadm create -e 11.1-7.5.0 11.1-7.5.0-bk
As a side effect, this generates a corresponding GRUB menu entry such as:
# bootadm list-menu
...
0 Oracle Solaris 11.1
1 11.1-7.5.0
2 11.1-7.5.0-bk
This is convenient and expected, but it isn't very cute.
For example, I'd like to prepend the "Oracle Solaris" string.
Of course we can manually edit the appropriate file as in previous releases.
In fact, that used to be the only way to customize anything about GRUB.
Fortunately (or not) we now count on bootadm sucommands:
# bootadm
...
bootadm set-menu ... key=value
bootadm list-menu ... -i
bootadm add-entry ...
bootadm remove-entry ... -i
bootadm change-entry ... -i
bootadm generate-menu [-f] ...
In particular, for the purpose of this post if suffices to me just the following:
# bootadm change-entry -i 1 title="Oracle Solaris 11.1-7.5.0"
# bootadm change-entry -i 2 title="Oracle Solaris 11.1-7.5.0-bk"
# bootadm list-menu
...
0 Oracle Solaris 11.1
1 Oracle Solaris 11.1-7.5.0
2 Oracle Solaris 11.1-7.5.0-bk
That's really cool, safe and more comfortable than manual editing.
Check bootadm(1M) for more detail.
For example, it's now easy to create boot entries for:
- single user mode/state (kernel argument -s).
- backups on another ZFS pool
