Wow, I was going to refute this, as I don't ever remember seeing any Solaris box do this. However, a Solaris 8 x86 vanilla install on VMware I did recently does indeed have swap on the first cylinders (see below). A Solaris 7 x86 install does not exhibit this behavior. Now I'm wondering if Solaris 9 does it. A Solaris 10 box I have access to has swap after root, not before.

It makes sense that it was 8. We hardly used 9 so I don't know what it did, but I suspect by 10 someone had had very strong words with whoever thought it was a good idea after some large customer had had an only-technically-their-fault outage because of it and been fierce at Sun. It was really stupidly dumb, I thought: solving a problem no-one had any more by the wrong method (if paging *was* a problem a better solution is to add a second slice on another physical disk as swap).