> >So, on SPARC, the miniroot runs off of the CD, but > on x86, it loads into a ramdisk? Do I understan > d your statement correctly? Why the difference? Is > this due to GRUB requirements? > > Yes. > > Originally, both ran the miniroot from disk but this > required the realmode > drivers for bootstrapping (loading bits from all over > the place until the > disk/net device driver was loaded). > > BIOSes turned out to be extremely brittle under the > demands of Solaris > booting and reading scores of files and the need for > real mode drivers made > driver development much harder. > > With grub, we just use the BIOS to load a single > large file and uncompress > it; this can be done using BIOS calls and doesn't > require the realmode > drivers.
Ah. Thanks for the thorough response. This is starting to make more sense to me now. Various Linux distros, as well as Belenix (and others?) have managed to get around this, though. I'm curious as to what they are doing to bypass the issues. Is it simply a matter of OS having to extract a (somewhat large) miniroot, or is there more they're doing? > It is hard to get around. > > Is it the graphical install you want or is it just > the 256MB limit which > is bad? It is the memory footprint (which seems to be much more than 256MB) that is the problem. But, to bring this topic back to the subject, I think that a well-designed graphical installer should run within the same small footprint (be it 256MB, or whatever). If the miniroot itself takes some 400 to 500MB, then anything you want to do to improve the graphical install experience for potential new users is severely hampered right out of the gate. Does this create a catch-22? Can we actually improve the install experience when the miniroot issues preclude usability on small-memory systems? I can't state for sure, but I suspect it will be a problem. It comes back down to the previous comments about who OpenSolaris is trying to reach, I guess. In the end, we can greatly improve the graphical install experience (which most people in this thread seem to feel is needed), but the benefits will be limited to those potential users with enough memory in their spare systems to actually be able to try it out. Others will have to be directed to try out the other distros, like Belenix. I'm not saying that having to use another distro is a bad thing, mind you, but it should be made clear that the "main" OpenSolaris branch (for lack of a better term right now) will require 512MB of memory--if you don't have that, don't even start wasting your bandwidth, and go straight to the other distros. Otherwise, you've ticked off the potential "customer" before he/she's even really out of the gate. Rainer This message posted from opensolaris.org
