Solaris 10 releases up to and including Solaris 10 8/07 ("S10U4") incorrectly detect newer Intel processors produced since 2007. This problem leads to the 64-bit Solaris kernel crashing (and usually causing a triple fault) almost immediately during startup, in both virtualized and physical environments.
The recommended solution is upgrading to at least Solaris 10 5/08 ("S10U5"). Alternative solutions include forcing Solaris to always boot the 32-bit kernel or applying a patch for bug 6574102 (while Solaris is using the 32-bit kernel).
When using more than one CPU, Solaris 10 releases 5/08 ("S10U5"), 10/08 ("S10U6"), and 5/09 ("S10U7") 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 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 (approx. 45 seconds) and warnings.
The recommended solution is upgrading to at least Solaris 10 10/09 ("S10U8") 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 2.6, 7 and 8 releases up to and including Solaris 8 4/01 ("S8U4") incorrectly set up Machine Check Exception (MCE) MSRs on Pentium 4 and some later Intel CPUs. The problem leads to the Solaris kernel crashing (and usually causing a triple fault) almost immediately during startup, in both virtualized and physical environments. Solaris 9 and later releases are not affected by this problem, and neither is Solaris 2.5.1 and earlier.
The recommended solution is upgrading to at least Solaris 8 7/01 ("S8U5"). Alternative solutions include applying a patch for bugs 4408508 and 4414557 (on an unaffected system).