[OpenIndiana-discuss] Obstacle to GPT label boot?

[Reginald Beardsley]

Would someone please direct me to an explanation  of why we can't boot from disk >2 TB in 2021?

It's very hard for me to see a significant obstacle to reading an x86 MBR that loads code that will then boot from GPT label disks.

I'm rebuilding my Sol 10 u8 system with my spare 2 TB disk.  I'd like to replace the 3x  2 TB disk RAIDZ1 setup with  a 4-5x disk RAIDZ2 using 4 TB disks using my s0 & s1 configuration.

I must assume that the Illumos market is dominated by customers who don't care about having a few small SMI labeled boot disks in a farm of large GPT labeled disks.  But for a 7 SATA port system, that's not very viable.

Linux, MS and BSD can do it, so we should be able to do it also.  It's become enough of a personal nuisance that I'm willing to fix it if I get a modest level of cooperation.

So please, point me at any known issues.  For workstations the s0 root pool and s1 export pool works really well.

Reg

BTW After a DIMM shuffle, "format -e" and scrubs no longer dump core on u8.  Now X goes off into la-la land :-(  Clearly I need new DIMMS.