[OpenIndiana-discuss] New Wiki page for adding a Windows GRUB entry

[Jim Klimov]

On 2013-08-30 22:07, Jean-Pierre wrote:
> Jim Klimov wrote:
>> On 2013-08-30 19:33, Jean-Pierre wrote:
>>> FIXME : The Windows wording for partition is volume and the OpenIndiana
>>> one is slice.
>>
>> I did not read it all (yet) but this here is a bit of misunderstanding
>> that I'd like to correct early on. Maybe just simplification for people
>> new to this all, but not correct still.
> [...]
>>
>> So, long story short, "The OpenIndiana wording for partition is slice"
>> is not a correct statement, and may mislead readers in the future :)
>
> I was aware of differences of concepts between the systems,
> and the need for some introductory precautions, so I
> marked the sentence as FIXME. You also raise an alarm on GPT
> partitions and LVM both of which should probably be excluded
> from the procedure (I have no personal experience about them).
>
> Maybe you can suggest an introduction, avoiding unnecessary
> details ?

I am not really a good author (yet) on short meaningful texts,
as I try to detail everything so that even a newbie can speed
up to understanding the "how" and "why" of systems to administer.

That said, I can try :)

---

This article explains some approaches to multi-booting OpenIndiana
residing along with some other operating systems on the same hard
disk (or SSD). First, a few words about the limitations that you
should be aware of.

OpenIndiana currently supports only booting from disks with legacy
MBR partitioning, which among other things limits the boot drives
to 2Tb and less. On many systems this is a moderate limitation,
because it is recommended to keep the OS (mirror) separately from
data/zone pool, frequently stored on a larger set of larger drives.

UNCERTAIN: OpenIndiana requires(?) that its MBR partition is among
the "primary" four partitions (and if your set of operating systems
needs more partitions, at least for data volumes, you might require
to use one of these four to define an "extended" partition - a large
container spanning the "rest of the disk", usually after a contiguous
space divided among the remaining three primary partitions; note below
about tricks for systems with over 9 partitions).

While OI lays out a "slice table" in its partition, and actually
uses one of these slices (the only one by default, covering most
of the partition) for the ZFS rpool, it is also picky in that a
drive should not contain several MBR partitions marked with Solaris
aka type 0x82 (the number is also used by default for Linux swap
partitions).

OpenIndiana uses a special branch of GRUB with ZFS support and may
lack direct support of newer filesystem and volume layouts relevant
for other operating systems, though it can chainload Windows and can
directly load Linux kernel and initrd miniroot files from partitions
formatted as ext2/ext3 (however it can not, for example, interpret
partitions with Linux LVM - containers of volumes with filesystems
inside).

Now that we've covered what you can not do, let's see what you *can*
do, and *how* you can do it....

---

Then your and/or Bryan's article goes on to detail multi-booting...

I don't want to hijack his page which as of now specifically regards
multiboot with Windows, and don't really have time available now to
combine and polish the texts; but if any of you guys feel like making
a page with consistent style and content on this matter - feel free
to use or adapt this exprompto introduction, if you like it ;)

HTH,
//Jim Klimov