[oi-dev] Fwd: [developer] Please review 4989 - BIS

[Nikola M.]

On 07/22/14 08:07 PM, Garrett D'Amore wrote:
> Running illumos on bare metal makes great sense; as a hypervisor, you 
> want to do that.  But that use case is completely at adds with the 
> idea of running dual boot.
That two things (VMs and dual boot) are not against each other, and I 
don't see why say they are mutually exclusive??
They are not and there are many reasons why would one use dual boot.
illumos and opensolaris-descendent distros use Boot Environments, (BEs) 
on top of ZFS, one can choose during boot, and I have not hear anyone 
bitching about that valuable option, yet less about one more menu item 
in GRUB, that does not boot system from ZFS dataset, but from other 
disk/partition...?
Difference between these two is close to none from user perspective, and 
I don't understand why you are bitching around about it, anyway.

> The dual boot use case is/was primarily intended for folks to be able 
> to use have multiple OS' on their hardware, and predates 
> virtualization technology.  These days, dual booting is just plain 
> silly, and I cannot
Not only you are wrong about what users need, and arguing with yourself 
actually, but later things that you said explain why people Want to be 
able to boot more then one OS on same desktop/laptop system.

Testing how things (and new hardware) are done with hardware to be able 
to report bugs about it.
(Who would want USB 3.0 working and any hardware at all working, but 
those using dual boot?)
Also one can not expect system to behave same way on bare metal and 
virtualized and expecting to have same performace from ZFS on disk(s) 
and zfs in virtualization, that use image file on top of, say, NTFS and 
are barely stupid to compare.
Under virtualization, illumos can not run KVM/Virtualbox, beacue it does 
not have control over CPU and virtualization UNDER illumos is exactly 
what one would use dual-booted illumos distro to test for..
.. so tester can upload locally tested VMs with zones up to the server.

Main problem is that illumos lack Virtualization I/O drivers for KVM, so 
that locally configured KVM in illlumos with zones, could be easily 
transferred on the servers in production, where bandwidth is better.
(Ask Joyent why they do NOT offer illumos inside KVM , but only Linux 
and windows - because there are no illumos I/O drivers for KVM as a guest)

That is why people would like to use illumos as Desktop On bare metal 
locally and
GDA, you should better think why illumos still does not have decent 
guest KVM I/O drivers,
then demonstrating lack of understanding for illumos users?
>   drivers.  These days I think anyone who dual boots and isn't writing 
> hardware drivers is either doing so as result of an installation 
> decision made years ago -- understandable, or is just insane.)
I think that any leader of open source project, yet leader of an whole 
OS kernel development
could be called insane if he wants to stop people from using OS in a 
certain way.

Dual-boot IS a way for New people to use illumos distros and promote 
platform and you can laugh as much as you want but people Value what 
they see with their own eyes and thet they can install themselves and 
run, right away and that includes shrinking partition to fit ZFS on same 
disk.

It is understandable that people have one HD in their laptop/desktop, 
and that they want full speed for their applications of different kind 
on different OSes and that people want to have Machine in their hands as 
close as possible to server they would be deploying.
That are also Solaris roots anyway, to basically have a Server on a 
desk, so you can manage it locally as the server in production would be 
managed and then use setting on large server - that is what you said 
once GDA, anyway. Having Desktop environment on that kind of install is 
a huge plus and eliminate the need for other machines to control it.
If Dual boot is poor man's test install, then Desktop is poor man's way 
to administer it with no need to set up laboratory of machines to try 
things out.. And as explained, some things simply can not be done inside 
VM (for started VMs themselves, etc.)

Why would someone want to keep windows/linux on same machine? Well ask 
them, maybe because there are some applications needed to be run in full 
speed with good graphics performance
Or because they have no leader of a project that bashes Desktop 
distribution use, whenever he has a chance.
I left it as a fail safe, to use apps only available there at full speed 
and to be able to test if new hardware works also with other OS, before 
reporting if it is working or not under illumos.
I end up not using windows when I installed Opensolaris/Openindiana but 
I would never kill it.

> I have to confess that I use VMware (a commercial v12n product) for my 
> illumos work these days -- in fact right now I have a couple of 
> different OS' running on my laptop at the same time -- MacOS, 2 
> instances of illumos, an instance of Windows, and an instance of 
> CentOS.  It just wouldn't be practical to do this multi boot.
This is not the first time you advertize other platforms, non-illumos 
applications and make laugh of users of illumos in this way. You can use 
whatever you like in your private life, but don't bash anyone else 
around to do what you are doing.

I am sorry, I don't buy Apple hardware for its'sick connection to OSX, I 
am not recommending VMWare's proprietary vendor lock-in that costs walls 
of money in production, when I have 3 different and better VM solutions 
and at the end instances of Windows are great virtualized, that is true. 
(btw VmWare does NOT work under illumos, so forget it)

For things like this illumos today IS used as virtualization platform, 
but mostly to support linux/windows hegemony of software and if one 
simple grub menu option that can boot not from ZFS dataset, but from 
separate partition/disk bother you that much, then I am out of options 
explaining it to you, GDA then problem is not technical in nature.
GDA, Maybe your problem is from using OSX on Apple hardware that blocks 
you from effectively using dual-boot and expecting to use single-vendor 
special apps to be able to dual-boot only certain "approved" systems 
(yuck!), but that is your problem, not the rest of the world using PCs 
without Apple logo on them.. :)