> Am 12.04.2016 um 23:09 schrieb Richard Elling
> <[email protected]>:
>
>
>> On Apr 12, 2016, at 1:39 PM, Dirk Steinberg <[email protected]
>> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>>
>> The root file system actually resides on a ram disk, which cannot be used
>> for booting.
>
> The RAM disk contains a UFS file system.
>
>>
>> If I do not boot from USB or PXE, I like to put the boot files
>> (kernel and boot_archive, plus a few GRUB files) onto my zones
>> pool. I agree that one could use UFS, but that requires slicing/
>> partitioning the disk making things more complex than necessary.
>> Using a whole-disk pool is much easier.
>
> This is a significant change in SmartOS architecture and IMHO, a
> significantly inferior
> approach.
>
> At InterModal Data, we have a different approach. We do install on one or
> more
> "boot disks" and keep a grub menu set for locally storing OS images (UFS in
> RAMdisk
> image). However, this is not a general-purpose solution. In our world, the
> "zones" pool
> is quite small, typically 32G or less. Thus we can easily accomodate "boot
> disks" that
> are 64GB or more, though it is very rare for us to see more than 200GB. There
> are a
> number of other constraints that impact us, that are not general purpose.
>
> So, can you have a boot image area that cohabitates a single disk? Yes, but
> there is
> a fair amount of work involved and every step brings you farther away from
> the easy,
> scalable method used by default in SmartOS. You'll be better served by
> burning a USB
> stick and taking a long lunch.
> — richard
Richard,
thanks for the explanation. I do understand the advantage of booting from USB,
just that the box I am currently fiddling with is a new, legacy-free Skylake box
with only xHCI, so effectively once SmartOS has booted, there is NO USB support
whatsoever, no keyboard, no USB stick, nada.
I also understand that I can slice a physical disk and have multiple UFS file
systems
and potentially even multiple ZFS pools on that disk. I have done all of this
before.
All I am saying is that I find it easier to use whole-disk zpools, and for some
time now,
the GRUB that ships with SmartOS does support (legacy-)booting off whole-disk
zpools.
That is very easy: just use the zones pool and copy the boot files to it.
I create a separate zfs dataset for the boot files (zones/smartos) and use that
as the bootfs.
## enable GRUB boot from whole-disk vdev zones pool
mkdir /zones/boot
cp -a <…..>/boot/grub /zones/boot
## first save boot ramdisk image without any pools mounted
dd bs=1M if=/dev/ramdisk/a of=/tmp/boot_archive
fsck -y /tmp/boot_archive
zfs create zones/smartos
mkdir -p /zones/smartos/platform/i86pc/amd64
mv /tmp/boot_archive /zones/smartos/platform/i86pc/amd64/boot_archive
print /platform/i86pc/kernel/amd64/unix | cpio -pduvma /zones/smartos
## install GRUB to MBR on whole-disk zones pool
installgrub -m -f /zones/boot/grub/stage1 /zones/boot/grub/stage2
/dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s0
Now you only need to add „bootfs zones/smartos“ to your
/zones/boot/grub/menu.lst entries, like so:
sed -i '' -e '/kernel/{x;s:.*: bootfs zones/smartos:;p;x;}'
/zones/boot/grub/menu.lst
That’s all. You can boot off you whole-disk zones pool now.
Disclaimer: YMMV. Be very careful. The above commands are potentially very
dangerous and could result in data loss. Check you device names.
/ Dirk
>
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