[OpenIndiana-discuss] Does OpenBSD support ZFS?

[Peter Tribble]

On Tue, Feb 3, 2015 at 7:03 PM, Jacob Ritorto <jacob.ritorto at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Nice.  Just grabbed it and tried, but this poor thing doesn't have enough
> RAM.  Now this is getting to be a personal challenge more than a pragmatic
> solution.  I feel like I'm so close.  Anyone know of a way to make the
> installation boot to something other than ramdisk?  Like, maybe I could
> pre-load a swap partition with the miniroot or something like that?
>

The ramdisk method is pretty well standard across the illumos
family now. The current network boot is even worse - the whole OS
gets loaded into RAM (the media boot handles /usr separately).

There are several ways to get round this. None currently in a
"supported" state (or even documented):

1. You should be able to use the existing install to copy the contents
of the CD to a new zpool (potentially on a new disk, although I don't
recall whether the Ultra-5 allowed a 2nd drive). This requires
unpacking the CD - the boot_archive is just a ufs image, the solaris.zlib
file is a lofi-compressed hsfs filesystem image containing /usr. (You said
you had snv65, I don't know whether lofiadm did compression back then.)
It shouldn't be that hard to emulate the Tribblix installer to do this (I'll
get around to it eventually, I need to do this or something close for some
other functionality I'm playing around with).

2. As a variant of (1), pull the packages from the repo and pkgadd
them to the new root. That's really all the Solaris 10 installer did,
only the repo was on the media.

3. Set up a network boot server and boot off NFS. I know this
works on x86, I haven't yet tried regular network boot or NFS
root on a sparc box. For minimal memory, you'll need genuine
NFS root, the vanilla network boot is just a different source
for the ramdisk.

Sounds like an interesting project. I wish I had more time to
work on it!


> On Tue, Feb 3, 2015 at 5:10 AM, Jonathan Adams <t12nslookup at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > On 3 February 2015 at 10:02, Jonathan Adams <t12nslookup at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > > On 3 February 2015 at 06:28, Michael Schuster <
> michaelsprivate at gmail.com
> > >
> > > wrote:
> > >
> > >> I think Martin Bochnig's opensxce may be an option - he claims that "
> > >> OpenSXCE runs [....] Sun UltraSPARC sun4u/sun4v-compatible 32-bit &
> > 64-bit
> > >> computers".
> > >>
> > >
> > > I believe that Martin has stated that OpenSXCE is dead, but that he was
> > > looking to work on a new project that he might announce later.
> > >
> >
> > My mistake, he's announced a new version on his twitter feed:
> >
> > " Friends! Back in Europe, more during next days. OpenSXCE 2015.01
> getting
> > pushed over the next weeks (x86 and afterwards SPARC)"
> > _______________________________________________
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> >
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-- 
-Peter Tribble
http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/