[OpenIndiana-discuss] The kiss of death
Reginald Beardsley
pulaskite at yahoo.com
Sat Apr 24 02:18:51 UTC 2021
I should like to say that from my perspective as the person who started this thread I consider your results 100% successful.
My goal was to increase the involvement of the user community in the process of creating a new release. It is a tremendous amount of work and many of us such as myself have been far too passive.
My profound thanks for your efforts.
Reg
On Friday, April 23, 2021, 08:06:23 PM CDT, Nelson H. F. Beebe <beebe at math.utah.edu> wrote:
This progress report is 2/3 positive.
I reported yesterday of my problems with frozen mouse cursor in the
GUI install from
http://dlc.openindiana.org/isos/hipster/test/OI-hipster-gui-20210405.iso
on CentOS 7.9.2009 with virt-manager 1.5.0 and qemu-system-x86_64
2.0.0.
Later that day, I repeated that experiment on Ubuntu 20.04, which has
virt-manager 2.2.1 and qemu-system-x86_64 4.2.1, considerably newer
than the versions available on CentOS 7.9.2009, but found that the
installation would not proceed because of missing audio and console
drivers. After my posting, I turned to other unrelated projects, had
a night's sleep, and woke up with an idea for OpenIndiana.
The virt-manager console for configuring a virtual machine has only
one driver for each of mouse and keyboard, but it has THREE for the
video controller: QXL (default), VGA, and Virtio. It has been rare to
have to use other than the default video type, so I normally don't
even think about changing the default.
For OpenIndiana on Ubuntu 20.04, I shutdown the stuck installer,
powered off the VM, changed to VGA, rebooted, and found that the
installer would then not produce a GUI display, but only a bare
console.
I powered off again, changed to Virtio, and this time, the installer
worked and the installation completed!
It then asked me to reboot, which I did, and it came up normally. I
immediately shut it down, took a virt-manager snapshot, brought it up,
ran "pkg install build-essential", powered off, took another snapshot,
powered on, installed more packages and user accounts, powered off,
took yet another snapshot, powered on, and I now have a working system
on which I'm attempting to build TeX Live 2021 (see my reports for
other systems at
http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/texlive-utah/
).
Later this morning, I returned to my campus office in order to meet
with a colleague who is a network and ZFS expert with long experience
in the Solaris family. We tried to find a way to get past the boot
failure on CentOS 7.9.2009, which I reported yesterday said
Loading unix...
Loading /platform/i86pc/amd64/boot_archive...
ZFS: i/o error - all block copies available
...
No rootfs module provided, aborting
That happens early in the boot process, well before there is any
chance to try to revert to an earlier boot environment. Despite Web
searching last night and today, and finding others have reported a
similar problem with ZFS on Solaris and FreeBSD, none of their
proposed fixes worked. So, a new OpenIndiana on CentOS 7.9.2009
remains out of reach.
Finally, I tried the GUI installer on VirtualBox on a small memory
Ubuntu 20.04 system. There, the installer worked flawlessly,
including a following "pkg install build-essential" and "pkg update"
and subsequent reboot. No configuration changes whatever were needed.
So, I now have 2 working OpenIndiana Hipster 2020.10 systems out of 4
attempts, and I can now get on with actually putting these VMs to
doing useful work.
It might be useful to add a README file to the download site that
summarizes the lessons:
VirtualBox: 20210405 unstaller works perfectly
newer virt-manager/QEMU: change video to Virtio from default QXL
older virt-manager/QEMU: probably unworkable
along with notes for other physical systems were people have gotten
successful installs, including instructions about what list members
have learned about the various NVIDIA driver choices.
Next week, when I'm back in my campus office, I may try to install
OpenIndiana with OVIRT/Qemu, our third virtualization platform: it is
newer than the virt-manager on CentOS 7, and offers the nice feature
of live VM migration across our multiple physical VM servers, but is
considerably more painful to manage and configure VMs for.
If OpenIndiana developers remember to post notices about new ISO
images added at
http://dlc.openindiana.org/isos/hipster/test/
then I'm certainly willing to try new VM installations; our experience
this week should speed up their creation.
----------------------------------------
Some background and comments of support:
Our use of SunOS, and later Solaris, began in 1987, and we were
predominantly based on Sun hardware until Sun was bought by Oracle
in 2010. After that, Oracle hardware pricing made their products
unaffordable for our always meager academic budgets. Since then,
our backbone servers have been mostly Dell, IBM, and HP hardware
running Red Hat, CentOS, Ubuntu, and ArchLinux, with hundreds of
VMs in our test lab running other operating systems.
Over our 33+ years of use, SunOS/Solaris has always been rock
solid, and Sun hardware (MC68K, SPARC, x86, and x86_64) was too.
We now have about 120 physical and virtual systems using ZFS,
including multiple Linux distributions, FreeBSD, soon NetBSD, and
of course all of the Solaris family O/Ses. In 15+ years of ZFS
and hundreds of TB of storage, we have never lost data from
filesystem corruption or disk failures.
We would like to see that record of solidity continue with OpenIndiana.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Nelson H. F. Beebe Tel: +1 801 581 5254 -
- University of Utah FAX: +1 801 581 4148 -
- Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB Internet e-mail: beebe at math.utah.edu -
- 155 S 1400 E RM 233 beebe at acm.org beebe at computer.org -
- Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ -
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Nelson H. F. Beebe Tel: +1 801 581 5254 -
- University of Utah FAX: +1 801 581 4148 -
- Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB Internet e-mail: beebe at math.utah.edu -
- 155 S 1400 E RM 233 beebe at acm.org beebe at computer.org -
- Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ -
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