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

[Bryan N Iotti]

That's very nice, Jim.

I'll work on putting it up today.


Thank you,

   Bryan

On Fri, 30 Aug 2013 23:50:04 +0200
Jim Klimov <jimklimov at cos.ru> wrote:

> 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
> 
> 
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-- 
Bryan N Iotti

+39 366 3708436
ironsides.medvet at runbox.com