On Wed, Dec 17, 2008 at 01:57:37PM -0600, Tim wrote: > On Wed, Dec 17, 2008 at 10:23 AM, <cindy.swearin...@sun.com> wrote: > > > Hi Alex, > > > > Sorry, I missed the 1.5 TB disk/boot issue previously. > > > > A project is underway to provide booting for disks that are large > > than 1 TB. This project is outside of a future project to provide > > booting from an EFI-labeled disk.
> Since I've heard differing stories over time: Is the EFI boot limitation a > limitation of PC BIOS, or is it somewhere in the software stack? Or I > suppose the third options is that it's a limitation of PC BIOS that can be > overcome with some software hacks. I belive both would be trouble. I suppose if you could put both labels on the disk you could have a hybrid that allows MBR booting but could allow EFI access later. But that gets tricky (if it's possible). However the 1TB limitation is on the Solaris VTOC, not on the MBR label. It's possible that you could make some modifications to Solaris to allow a (sub-1TB) MBR partition holding a Solaris VTOC label for booting and then use the rest of the disk for ZFS. That's how I read the previous message. > >From what I recall, itanium systems and apple systems have no issues booting > from an EFI label. Right. EFI was part of the Itanium stuff, and Apple supported it in their hardware as well. But standard BIOS doesn't. > I would assume this may apply to sparc based systems as > well since they're also running OBP (like apple). Pre-EFI apple hardware ran OpenFirmware. While I don't think it would be impossible to add EFI/GPT label support to it, I doubt there's much clamor for it. As far as I am aware, Apple's EFI machines do not use OpenFirmware any longer. -- Darren _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
