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

[Jean-Pierre]

Hi Jim,

Jim Klimov 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 ;)

Oh yes, nice job, I do like it.

I will try to check whether you can install OpenIndiana
on a logical partition.

Jean-Pierre

>
> HTH,
> //Jim Klimov