[OpenIndiana-discuss] zpool import not possible after slot change

[Reginald Beardsley]

"the inner workings of an operating system so complicated that no one person actually understands all of it" 

Bryan Cantrill in the Foreword to "Solaris Internals" , McDougall and Mauro, 2nd ed 2007

This is true of any production level OS whether Windows, Linux, BSD or Solaris derived. The FreeBSD kernel is 1.5 million lines of code. I don't even want to know what X and the window managers add. No person can remember that much even if they had time to read all of it. If they did read it all, it would be different by the time they finished. If that doesn't constitute "terminal complexity" I can find no other way to describe the situation.

Could I figure out what is going on with the USB naming?  Of course, that's how I made my living.  But it is time consuming and simply not worth the effort.  And might, for valid reasons, not be fixable.

My concern is the perception a new user has when they boot an OI release.  It should be good.  In fact, it is already better than anything else I've tested recently.

When programs which appear on the Live Image Desktop crash or  icons for installation instructions referenced in the GUI install are missing and have been missing for multiple releases I think it quite reasonable to be concerned and to point out that the *user* community should be more involved in testing release candidates.

I have now attempted installs of S11.4, Debian 10.9, 2021.04-rc1, 2020.10, 2017.10, Oracle Linux 8.3 and S10_u11.  Of these S11.4 and OL 8.3 succeeded in booting after the install.  S10_u11 just informed me that "The disc you inserted is not a Solaris CD/DVD".  This is after I selected option 4 from the Solaris 10 install menu so I could install to a ZFS pool,  had filled out all the fields and hit F2 to start the installation.

Is this a BIOS issue?  Or a driver issue?  I have no idea.  I suspect it's a bit of both as I do not have any documentation for the BIOS settings and this has Intel's ME, TPM and God only knows what else.  After a BIOS update, it won't even boot 2021.04-rc1 in single user mode.  It goes into maintenance on a login service failure booting from the DVD.  I can't even investigate why.

It runs Windows 10 and S11.4.  The latter is far too much like Windows 10 to suit me.  MATE I can live with.  Unless I get lucky, this is going back on Monday and I'll get an older machine which is less likely to have driver issues.

Reg

On Thursday, April 22, 2021, 11:15:13 PM CDT, Joshua M. Clulow <josh at sysmgr.org> wrote:


On Thu, 22 Apr 2021 at 19:10, Reginald Beardsley via
openindiana-discuss <openindiana-discuss at openindiana.org> wrote:
> I do *not* understand why there is any justification for renaming physical interfaces between boots, but I had a demonstration today when a USB port was renamed c1t0d0p0 which had previously been c11t0d0p0.
>
> I think we have reached terminal complexity. No one understands the system any longer and so they randomly break things of which they are unaware.

Your consistent negative hyperbole in these threads is frankly
exhausting. We have, today, the best introspection and debugging
tools that have existed in the fifty year history of UNIX. The
software might not be doing what you want at this minute, in your
specific environment, but it absolutely can be understood and fixed.

If you want help with something, please try engaging constructively
and with some empathy for the people to whom you are sending mail.
Demonstrate that you've actually investigated your issue, rather than
opening and immediately closing with a fatalistic complaint about how
everything is broken and the project is doomed.

I don't know what happened with your USB disk having a new device
name, but I guarantee that were one to examine what the system was
doing, it would be possible to find out. In spite of the negativity,
many people have tried to help you in your endeavours in the last few
months.