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

[Andreas Wacknitz]

Am 23.04.21 um 19:48 schrieb Reginald Beardsley via openindiana-discuss:
> "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.
I would be happy if we could fix all the issues. But that would need
more volunteers to help fixing bugs and enhancing the current situation.
For projects with lots of developers tests with exotic hardware or
configurations can be valuable.
But OI in fact has problems to keep even simple things up-to-date and it
gets worse every day.
Complaining about things in this situation is not helpful at all without
providing updates or patches that fix things.
We know that many things don't work or aren't perfect. But with a single
digit number of people submitting PR's to oi-userland you cannot expect
more.
I am trying to get more people involved for some time now. I am by far
more relaxed to merge PR's than former maintainers did because I don't
want to alienate the few volunteers who at least try to work on problems
and updates. Talking is easy but we need more actions.

The echo of my last offer to give interested people a helping hand to
get accustomed to our build system was exactly zero.

For me we have the strange situation that even people who claim to be
maintainers for a software and claim to be OI users don't act even when
I tell them that their software is outdated in OI. This is something
that irritates me to the bone. Especially when the only reaction is
something like "Oh that is surprising. It should be quite easy to update
the package!"

>
> 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
>
If you have problems with so many OS's you should rethink your
requirements. I would already have changed to a smaller boot disk, eg. a
pair of 250GB or 500GB SSD's. There is enough space in the Z820 to add
them somewhere and if you don't have enough SATA connectors you could
easily add an HBA, eg. a simple LSI SAS HBA.

Andreas