Hi, with the integration of 5560, 5561, and 5664 we now fully support booting from EFI-labeled disks, including but not limited to large disks (>2TB) and whole-disk vdevs. Booting from fdisk/vtoc partitioned disks should not be affected in any way, these changes are intended to be 100% backwards compatible.
Users that have updated their systems to the latest illumos bits and want to convert an existing mirrored rpool to whole-disk vdevs can use the following procedure to do so: 1. Detach one half of the mirror: zpool rpool detach cYtYdYs0 2. Reattach it as whole disk: zpool rpool attach cXtXdXs0 cYtYdY 3. Wait for the resilver to finish. 4. Install new boot blocks: installgrub -m -f /boot/grub/stage1 /boot/grub/stage2 /dev/rdsk/cYtYdYs0 5. Optionally, reboot from cYtYdY to make sure booting works. 6. Detach the other half of the mirror: zpool rpool detach cXtXdXs0 7. Reattach it as whole disk: zpool rpool attach cYtYdY cXtXdX 8. Wait for the resilver to finish. 9. Mirror the boot blocks: installgrub -M /dev/rdsk/cYtYdYs0 /dev/rdsk/cXtXdXs0 10. Optionally, reboot from cXtXdX to make sure booting works. Depending on what distribution you are using your grub menu.lst file (in /rpool/boot/grub/menu.lst) may be using the findroot command to find the rpool. The invocation of this command differs depending on the kind of partitioning used: - findroot (pool_rpool,0,a) Thats the traditional way to look for rpool in slice 0 of the first fdisk partition. It will not find anything on an EFI-labeled disk. - findroot (pool_rpool,0) That will look for rpool in the first partition, which can only be an EFI partition as we don't support installing into fdisk partitions without further dividing them into slices. While migrating I suggest you duplicate your default menu.lst entry and experiment use both findroot variants until everything is migrated. Apparently OmniOS can boot without using findroot at all, which may or may not work for other distributions, too. Distributors that want to allow installation on EFI-labeled disks must change their installers, either redefining what "whole disk install" means or by adding a new installation option. Creating the rpool using EFI-partitioning will simplify the procedure as you no longer need to worry about fdisk and fmthard, you can just create rpool the natural way: 1. zpool create rpool cXtXdX [cYtYdY] 2. installgrub -m -f /boot/grub/stage1 /boot/grub/stage2 /dev/rdsk/cXtXdXs0 [ 3. installgrub -M /dev/rdsk/cXtXdXs0 /dev/rdsk/cYtYdYs0 ] Enjoy this new ability. Please let me know if anything doesn't work as expected. Hans -- %SYSTEM-F-ANARCHISM, The operating system has been overthrown ------------------------------------------- illumos-discuss Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/182180/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/182180/21175430-2e6923be Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21175430&id_secret=21175430-6a77cda4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
