Hello, For past couple of days I have been working on distro constructor to figure out how we can use it to create a RAW disk image consisting of "custom" opensolaris virtual appliances (read minimized without desktop features) which then as needed can be converted to either VDI or VMDK or AMI (Amazon EC2 images).
The concept that I am using is simple: I created my own virtapp.xml (ala slim_cd.xml) with minimum packages that I need and at the end where slim_cd create ISO image I create an hdd image formed by using lofiadm on a blank file which acts as my logical empty hard disk of a fixed size say 3GB and then I create a zpool on top of that lofi device and in the end I have an hard disk image which I can convert to VDI format using VBoxManage convertdd or any other format. However I am seeing few problems: My biggest problem that I have encountered is installing grub on this lofi device installgrub fails if I use the following (lofi presents /dev/rlofi/1 as a character acess) First of all /boot/solaris/update_grub returns but it actually fails while using lofi device (without throwing any message)... Doing the individual components I found the script update_grub is not handling zpools devices which are special devices for example it tries to prepend /dev/rdsk to every device it finds even if it is /dev/lofi/1 Secondly if I try to do the same steps manually I get two problems First bootadm update on a lofi device throws error: # bootadm update-menu -Z -R /mnt -o /dev/rlofi/1 bootadm: invalid device /dev/rlofi/1: cannot determine pool name bootadm: failed to get pool for device: /dev/rlofi/1 bootadm: invalid device /dev/rlofi/1: cannot determine pool name bootadm: failed to get pool name from /dev/rlofi/1 bootadm: failed to create GRUB boot signature for device: /dev/rlofi/1 bootadm: failed to get grubsign for root: /mnt, device /dev/rlofi/1 or even if I try the regular block access /dev/lofi/1 # bootadm update-menu -Z -R /mnt -o /dev/lofi/1 bootadm: invalid device /dev/lofi/1: cannot determine pool name bootadm: failed to get pool for device: /dev/lofi/1 bootadm: invalid device /dev/lofi/1: cannot determine pool name bootadm: failed to get pool name from /dev/lofi/1 bootadm: failed to create GRUB boot signature for device: /dev/lofi/1 bootadm: failed to get grubsign for root: /mnt, device /dev/lofi/1 The second problem with the manual approach is using installgrub on lofi device.. # installgrub /mnt/boot/grub/stage1 /mnt/boot/grub/stage2 /dev/rlofi/1 mount: /dev/lofi/1 is not a DOS filesystem. cannot mount /dev/lofi/1 I can potentially try it with an actual hard disk but I don't have any spare one right now and thought I could leverage lofi to do the magic but guess not.. Does anybody have any other ideas? Thanks in advance. Regards, Jignesh -- Jignesh Shah http://blogs.sun.com/jkshah The New Sun Microsystems,Inc http://sun.com/postgresql
