On Mon, 2005-09-05 at 04:52, Steven Destika wrote: > I am not sure what additional stuff Solaris version of Grub provides but none > the less I couldn't think of anything that will be needed routinely and which > isn't provided by the Linux version. (I can boot from USB/Firewire disks, I > can preload as many kernel modules as I want, I can use either initrd or > initramfs, the whole process is more flexible than required, I can use the > net console, ... etc. there might be more to this - all possible even with > 64Mb RAM ;) I mean it's certainly not lacking.
If you mean the changes to Grub that Sun made ? The main change is providing support for Solaris UFS filesystem. > I haven't yet looked at why Solaris needs so much memory - but I was > comparing it with other equally featureful OSes which don't need it. So that > way it was obvious to me that if I need the above listed services (aren't > these the only normally needed ones), it should be possible to get them with > less use of resources as demonstrated by the other OSes. The installer has a large miniroot that is exploded into the RAM disk that miniroot is about 130Mb in size so you still need some space to actually run the install programs. That miniroot includes an X server and everything else needed to do a GUI install. The reason we do this is so that you can do the full install from multiple bits of removable media without requiring a reboot. > Now you can tell me, FOR EXAMPLE, that Solaris provides Zones, Blah, Foo, Bar > features and that's why it needs 256Mb of RAM to just boot I am not going to > buy that for one reason - I haven't even heard of these features and I don't > even need them in order to use Solaris as say a Workstation OS (many will > agree). In this case (I am not yet saying it is the case) it surely sounds > like unnecessary feature bloat to me. and you would be correct it has nothing to do with those features because they aren't relevant at install time only at runtime if you choose to use them. > It should be possible to pick features which I need and which my machine is > capable of running and throw away the others. You can but the installer currently explodes this 130Mb disk image into a ramdisk to do the install. It has nothing to do with Grub it is all to do with the install image. Now after you have installed you don't have this issue, the archive that grub puts in memory for the Solaris multiboot program is much smaller, the one on my build 20 machine is 32Mb and that includes bothe 32bit and 64bit binaries it is basically just the kernel stuff from /kernel and /platform/i86pc/kernel plus a couple of very small (but critical) files from /etc. Very very different to the install case. So you don't need 256Mb to run Solaris but unfortunately due to the way the installer works for Solaris you do need that to install. Note I have been careful here to say Solaris all the way through this not OpenSolaris and not SchilliX because it is the Solaris installer we are talking about here and that isn't yet available as source from opensolaris.org. Hopefully this answers your question, or at least helps you ask some follow on questions. -- Darren J Moffat TZ=Europe/Dublin _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
