> > Other than simply disagreeing, can you provide > some > > reasons why this > > layout would unacceptable to users? > > I have already done so, did you not read what I > wrote? > > That layout does not consider OpenSolaris target > audience at all. Your target audience knows nothing > of LU, and they're stomped with the concept of slices > inside of a BIOS partition.
Then educate them - it's not that different in concept from logical partitions within an extended partition, except that only Solaris knows about the Solaris slices, and that Solaris AFAIK can't boot off a logical partition. OTOH, as EFI labels become more common and fdisk partitions fade away, more top-level partitions will be possible, and everybody's understanding (such as it is) may need to change. > And: that layout wastes 15GB of space for something > that in most cases will never be used! > > LU is for sysadmins, not end users. In case it > slipped "through the cracks", most people are afraid > of the CLI and have difficulty using it. And even if > there was a GUI, the concept of LU is so "off the > wall", your end users would be stomped anyway. Why? Multiple boot environments isn't that difficult to understand. Windows installations often have some sort of a recovery partition, although it may be much smaller than the boot partition rather than the same size. It's not the same thing, but it all comes down to how you explain it. A simple enough explanation of costs/benefits (and in particular that it may mean a reload to add after-the-fact) ought to be possible. If LU can optionally maintain the grub menu to reflect both new and previous boot environment (I don't know if it can, haven't been there), that would make such things more obvious, I think. In other words, even if LU isn't a no-brainer now, it wouldn't take much for it to evolve to be at least a minimal-brainer, and given the reload to retrofit it, it might make sense to plan ahead. > Finally, any good sysadmin will know about LU, and > will know how to slice up the disk in just about any > way imaginable. That audience definitely does not > need presliced and preinstalled systems, becase they > will know what they want and "one size fits all" > factory layout certainly won't work! At the enterprise level, all defaults suck. > In other words: it's a perfect example of vendor > believing that he knows what his customers want, and > at the same time not listening to his customers. I think another post refuted that point already. At least in the example, the LU partition was contiguous with free space, so blowing it away after-the-fact would reclaim it. (contrast that with wanting to add an LU partition after having already committed the entire disk to something or other) This message posted from opensolaris.org
