[OpenIndiana-discuss] 32-bit support in OpenIndiana Hipster

[Jay F. Shachter]

First of all, I have several 32-bit computers in production, and I
would like to be able to install and run OpenIndiana on them, but I
cannot demand that anyone donate his time to accommodate my wishes.
I mention this only if the volunteers are curious to know whether
anyone would use 32-bit OpenIndiana if it continued to exist.  At
least one person would, I don't know if there are any others.

Second of all, there were two points made, peripheral to this
discussion really, to which I want to respond.  Bruce Lilly wrote:

> 
> NetBSD has most of what I need for general-purpose desktop and
> server systems.  The one major thing lacking at the moment is a
> decent office suite port. Minor deficiencies include limited support
> for hardware sensors (temperature (HDD temperature via SMART works,
> but not e.g. motherboard sensors), voltages), and the usual BSD
> utility quirks (ps, ls, make; fixable by installing alternatives).
> 

I have NetBSD installed on my primary computer, and I regret it.  The
main, or, perhaps, the sole reason for my negative feelings about
NetBSD, is its poor support of ZFS.  I waited until NetBSD 7 was
available, and installed all my other OSes first, but it made no
difference, NetBSD still does not have decent support for ZFS.  The
"zpool upgrade -v" command only goes up to 23, while the "zfs upgrade
-v" command only goes up to 4.  This is completely inexplicable, as
FreeBSD supports up to versions 28 and 5, respectively.  I highly
doubt that NetBSD reimplemented ZFS; they undoubtedly did what FreeBSD
and ZFSOnLinux did -- take the open-sourced implementation from
OpenSolaris -- so why the devil didn't they take the most recent
version, and support at least up till versions 28 and 5?  My OSes
share data with each other thru ZFS, and after I installed NetBSD I
had to downrev my ZFS pool -- which, as you know, is impossible, I had
to make another ZFS pool and then copy everything over to it -- and
now, whenever I create a file or directory on either NetBSD or on
ZFSOnLinux, it is inaccessible on FreeBSD or any Solaris-based system
to anyone but root.  I think this has something to do with the fact
that on ZFS filesystem access always go thru ACLs, and NetBSD and
ZFSOnLinux create files and directories without any ACLs.  The various
Linux systems can see ZFS files created by one another, but on FreeBSD
or any Solaris-based system, I have to do a chmod on the file or
directory -- even if it is only changing it to its existing mode --
before I can access it in any way, unless I am superuser.  This is so
annoying, that I need a word more intense than "annoying" to describe
how annoying it is.  And it is all NetBSD's fault.

Then, later on in the same digest, Aur?lien Larcher (that's how it
shows up on the digest, his email address is aurelien.larcher at gmail.com)
wrote:

> 
> What are the missing features [of OpenIndiana grub]?  Is there a
> file system missing for multiboot?  Or is it just "legacy" for the
> sake of "legacy"?  Honestly I do not know, I only use OI on full
> disks.
> 

(I have eliminated the spaces before the question marks, to conform to
the typographic conventions of the English language.  But I have added
a space after each question mark, again to conform to the typographic
conventions of the English language, which require more space between
sentences than between words.)

OpenIndiana doesn't use legacy grub, it uses a program based on legacy
grub: legacy grub didn't support ZFS, and it didn't support kernel$
and initrd$ for constructing an architecture-dependent pathname.  The
current version of grub does support ZFS, and it supports if-then-else
conditional execution of statements, which could be used to boot the
appropriate architecture-dependent kernel (unless 32-bit kernels are
abandoned, making the whole thing moot).  So OpenIndiana could upgrade
to the current version of grub.  What Aur?lien asked, though, was not
whether OpenIndiana could upgrade to the current version of grub (as
Solaris 11.2 did), but why it would be desirable, and I can answer
that question too.  From my standpoint, the chief inconvenience of
OpenIndiana grub is that it does not support LVM.  This means that, if
I have Linux systems in which /boot resides on LVM, the moment I
install OpenIndiana I render those systems inaccessible.  This is
bloody inconvenient.

The other thing that is bloody inconvenient is that OpenIndiana grub
does not support kfreebsd and knetbsd.  It does, of course, support
chainloader +1, but for reasons that are unclear to me, the most
recent versions of FreeBSD cannot be booted by chainloader +1, you
have to kfreebsd /boot/loader.  This means that the moment I install
OpenIndiana I also render my FreeBSD system inaccessible.  This is
also bloody inconvenient.  A description of what I did to emable
OpenIndiana to coexist with my Linux and FreeBSD systems is, perhaps,
outside the scope of this mailing list, but it was bloody
inconvenient.

Incidentally, has anyone done anything about the inability to have
more than one OpenSolaris-derived operating system per disk?  No other
normal operating system I know suffers from this bizarre limitation.
If anyone has done anything about this, please let me know what.


                        Jay F. Shachter
                        6424 N Whipple St
                        Chicago IL  60645-4111
                                (1-773)7613784   landline
                                (1-410)9964737   GoogleVoice
                                jay at m5.chicago.il.us
                                http://m5.chicago.il.us

                        "Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur"