[OpenIndiana-discuss] Installing OI on USB stick

[Jim Klimov]

On 2013-03-01 14:44, Reginald Beardsley wrote:
> I'd ask why?  There's no requirement that there only be a single OI slice per disk. The installer and various other things push in that direction for some reason, but it's not a valid limitation that I can see.

Well, approaches good for smaller machines are not so good on bigger
ones. Say you use this with an array of 48 drives in a box (Thumper)
and wanted all vdev sized to be equal for balanced IO. Would you
reserve the rpool size on each of the drives? (Thumper might be a
bad example, only two disks are bootable anyway, so the tail of the
rpool disk can be used for something else, like a big temp; but you
get the overall picture).

Now, there might be uses for smallish partitions on faster sectors
with shorter seek strokes - you might use them for L2ARCs, ZILs,
or just a pool with more speed-critical data. But that would be a
contrived use for something you didn't intend to have in the first
place, quite likely :)

//Jim