[oi-dev] Obstacle to GPT label boot?

[Reginald Beardsley]

OK, now we are getting somewhere. I don't have an EFI BIOS so far as I know. In fact, the erroneous disk sizes reported in the SETUP menus confirm it does not read EFI labels. However, after some fiddle I've located a more recent BIOS for Linux which I shall try out. Perhaps it does handle EFI booting now.

I can put an EFI label on a disk with format(1m), but that does not allow the 2020.10 installers (any of the 3) to let me select the 100 GB s0 slices I create for the root pool. It doesn't even appear to see the EFI label.

I can easily use >2 TB disks on u8; I just can't boot from them. I recently put a zfs pool on a 4 and a 12 TB USB drive for data transfers and backups using u8. So the EFI labels it creates are just fine.

In my case OI *is* my daily driver unless I'm doing serious programming and data analysis in which case I use my Sol 10 u8 system. Debian and Windows are just for binary only software and live on a dual boot machine.

As EFI has an MBR it should be possible to use that sector to load the EFI label and boot code on an old system in such a fashion that the boot process is agnostic about the BIOS and will work with either. I should note that Debian doesn't have an issue using the current BIOS and a >2 TB disk. So a BIOS agnostic loader is not technically a problem.

The obvious first step is to clone the repositories for Illumos, OI and FreeBSD on the 4 TB USB disk so I can move them around.

A search tells me there are 33 Illumos repositories on github. Should I use this one?

https://github.com/illumos

For OI I located this as the obvious choice:

https://openindiana.github.io/

And for FreeBSD, this:

https://cgit.freebsd.org/

For Linux this appears to be what I should use:

https://github.com/torvalds/linux

I'd appreciate confirmation that those are the correct, canonical repositories for each project. I presume that there is a "boot" directory somewhere in each tree, but if it has a different name please let me know.


Have Fun!
Reg  
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