[OpenIndiana-discuss] Installing OI on USB stick

[Reginald Beardsley]

Nothing about the disk "geometry" means anything anymore.   Back in 4.1.1 days I measured the effects of various geometry based disk parameters before building filesystems. But they haven't meant anything for a very long time.

As for something like Thumper, you shouldn't have all the disks in the same vdev anyway.  10 GB of disk space is about $0.50US.  So "wasting" a few small s0 slices in a 5-8 disk RAIDZ array is cheaper than using USB flash drives.  Also 100% allocating drives leads to the situation that a similar size drive might not work as a replacement. If the replacement is a single sector smaller, you can't use it as a replacement.

There's a lot of screwy old logic in format, prtvtoc & fmthard and sd that tends not to play nicely w/ modern drives.

Have Fun!
Reg

--- On Fri, 3/1/13, Jim Klimov <jimklimov at cos.ru> wrote:

> From: Jim Klimov <jimklimov at cos.ru>
> Subject: Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] Installing OI on USB stick
> To: "Discussion list for OpenIndiana" <openindiana-discuss at openindiana.org>
> Date: Friday, March 1, 2013, 7:56 AM
> 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
> 
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