RE: [discuss] Obstacle to GPT label boot?

[garrett]

OmniOS Just Works, and we have also incorporated the Loader project into RackTop’s illumos distribution.   It shouldn’t be too hard, but it does take a bit of patience and trial and error to make these sorts of things work.  You’ll also need to make sure your that your BIOS is EFI capable (which shouldn’t be too hard in 2021.)   It sounds like OI could use some volunteerism here.  I think the problem is that most folks – especially those doing commercial work with illumos – are not using OI.  OI’s focus historically has been on desktops / laptops, and that’s a never-ending battle (the desktop space is under constant churn thanks to our friends in the Linux community), and keeping up is a large enough body of work – with out any economic incentive – that the distribution finds it difficult to find contributors.  (Never mind the constant churn in the desktop/laptop space for hardware – e.g. good luck finding drivers for NICs, WLAN cards, framebuffers, etc.)   These days I generally do not recommend running an illumos distribution on a workstation unless you’re a glutton for punishment and willing to spend a large part of your existence trying to make all the broken stuff work and settle for the fact that pretty much none of the mainstream applications are going to be available.   Instead, a much better choice is to run illumos in a server setting (which can be in a VM on a desktop btw).  And if you’re going to do that, there is no real reason that I would recommend OI over one of the other distributions such as OmniOSce or SmartOS.   Sent from Mail for Windows 10   From: Reginald Beardsley via illumos-discuss Sent: Thursday, March 18, 2021 8:28 PM To: illumos-discuss Subject: Re: [discuss] Obstacle to GPT label boot?   I can do this if someone will point me in the right direction. I'm about to start a bespoke CS course via iPad for the widow and eldest daughter of a friend from grad school at Austin who was so unspeakably rude as to die of liver cancer last spring. That will fork into a separate Arduino based embedded programming course for his 13 year old youngest son after a few sessions. But I want the 13 year old to understand how EE and CS connect I want to start at 1950's systems so the Arduino is quite relevant at the start. Reg On Thursday, March 18, 2021, 10:15:25 PM CDT, Judah Richardson <judahrichard...@gmail.com> wrote:     The problem seems to be lack of manpower/UEFI expertise on the OI dev side. Which is not a strike against them; honestly the fact that OI boots at all with that small of a team and minimal (AFAIK) upstream code is nothing short of miraculous. The project just needs someone who knows UEFI in the same manner a launch company needs a rocket scientist, despite whoever else they might have.   On Thu, Mar 18, 2021 at 10:02 PM Jason King <jason.brian.k...@gmail.com> wrote: Is it possibly an installer issue with how the main zpool (e.g. rpool) is created? I don’t think the bootloader in OmniOS (or SmartOS booting off a zpool) are any different than what’s in OI, so that’s the only thing I can think of.   From: Judah Richardson <judahrichard...@gmail.com> Reply: illumos-discuss <discuss@lists.illumos.org> Date: March 18, 2021 at 8:18:15 PM To: illumos-discuss <discuss@lists.illumos.org> Subject:  Re: [discuss] Obstacle to GPT label boot?     On Thu, Mar 18, 2021 at 8:11 PM Hans Rosenfeld <rosenf...@grumpf.hope-2000.org> wrote: On Fri, Mar 19, 2021 at 12:31:08AM +0000, Reginald Beardsley via illumos-discuss wrote: > Would someone please direct me to an explanation  of why we can't boot > from disk >2 TB in 2021? Have you tried? What problems did you run into? I do believe he was referring to OI specifically. AFAIK, OI itself (not the live USB) has long had EFI boot issues, while other Illumos distributions such as OmniOS don't.   Unless I'm mistaken, the issue has been repeatedly paved over in great detail on the OI mailing list. illumos has had support for booting from disks > 2TB for a few years now, both in our ancient grub boot loader and of course also in the new loader that Toomas Soome ported from FreeBSD a few years ago. Hans -- %SYSTEM-F-ANARCHISM, The operating system has been overthrown ------------------------------------------ illumos: illumos-discuss Permalink: https://illumos.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/T04ff6364a70ba334-M54025247a9158583db3bf331 Delivery options: https://illumos.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/subscription illumos / illumos-discuss / see discussions + participants + delivery options Permalink   illumos / illumos-discuss / see discussions + participants + delivery options Permalink