The smartos-latest.iso is the only illumos distro compatible with all iso9660.efi drivers out there. I hope to have hipster-repack.iso available later today; it only works with the included iso9660_x64.efi, which is the 32-bit GRUB "_x64" driver. I will also be posting smartos-repack.iso, with the latest (earlier this month) 64-bit iso9660_x64.efi included. I don't know why this is, yet. I only figured it out today. Three solid months of primary focus, figuring out my repack.iso's.
An interesting discovery, is that Bodhi and Chandra both edited the one line of code for packaging their respective distros, the same way. One calls mkisofs, the other calls xorriso, except Bodhi also edited xorriso to genisoimage. I won't get around to porting xorriso anytime soon, but it will be done... -Eric ---- On Mon, 03 Jun 2024 16:48:09 -0700 Eric J Bowman via illumos-discuss <[email protected]> wrote --- UEFI with no CSM (excluding CSM "disabled" in "BIOS") sees "Solaris Boot" or "FreeBSD Boot" when looking for a partition to boot; this isn't a MBR, so all it can do is boot the drive. Without CSM to tell it how to legacy boot a drive in 32-bit protected mode, the 16-bit real-mode boot proceeds from the 8088 running MINIX whence it (likely) came, with but one exception: PMBR. Now your installer's running in 16-bit protected mode... so when it goes to write gptzfsboot... it's really zfsboot... because it doesn't thnk the system speaks 32-bit UEFI, although it is similar to the language used by a binary moisture evaporator, or so I'm told. My "computer museum" (glorified shed) contains my old Packard-Bell 386, from the days when I was porting my code to protected mode, and couldn't boot DOS or Windows or Netware from the "CDROM" which was really a CD Player with an IDE interface. So I had to buy what's been my office doorstop for 25 years, 100% functional uptime and quite the conversation piece, says "NEC" on it and has a SCSI interface, only a brick due to lack of adapterability. Little did I know until now, that at that time, I could've booted BSD/Solaris from my Packard Bell's internal CD Player. The reason that, alone of all Ubuntu distros, Bodhi fails the same way as, alone of all Solaris distros, XStreamOS-Chandra? They forgot to -no-emul when they El Torito'd. When you dd distro.iso to a partition, you get an empty partition and no error message, because the firmware doesn't know about 3.5" floppy images, so the OS routes the write right to /dev/null and dd reports a successful write, right? ;-) It's time to relegate this hack to the dustbin of history, if there's any room left in there with all those AOL CD's it enabled, and get with the UEFI program. This issue causes folks to just move on, and reinforce the word-on-the-street that FreeBSD and Solaris are obsolete relics which don't comply with UEFI when really, it's just the distro.iso's. Back to GhostBSD... In the "multiboot community" which includes Rufus, Ventoy, Etcher, list goes on, compatibility lists exclude all other FreeBSD/Solaris distros "because FreeBSD/Solaris" for underlying "UEFI reasons" belied by GhostBSD's presence in Ventoy, which nobody will tell you comes down to it's /EFI not /efi BUT there you have it. When EFI came along, /EFI went through the same lowercase() as /boot, because part of the hack from back when a bunch of bigwigs got high together in the sierras was breaking FAT with /boot *deliberately* and now that UEFI mandates vFAT compliance, it's /EFI/boot. The only reason GhostBSD only installs properly for me from Ventoy, is that Ventoy copied the hack that Linux uses to launch their kernel in PXE, which I didn't realize how worked until lately because I'm not into Linux, but immediately recognize as the ol' QEMM A20-kbd-interrupt-your-way-into-protected-mode hack... and Linux folks are saying Solaris is obsolete? Good grief, all y'all need to quit arguing, because after over a decade away from IT and 15 from Solaris, I come back and find my problems result from everyone's still using 1980's hacks. Stop it! :-) Also, OmniOS CE fails interoperability the same way as Alpine Linux, by using a " " in what's effectively a DOS filename. Because mkisofs isn't the only tool that won't bitch about that, thinking you're burning an Audio CD. So there's a clear choice to be made in the Solaris and FreeBSD worlds (Net and Open don't use this hack), moving forward with UEFI or sticking with supporting CD Player boot, you can't have it both ways. -Eric https://illumos.topicbox.com/latest / illumos-discuss / see https://illumos.topicbox.com/groups/discuss + https://illumos.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/members + https://illumos.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/subscription https://illumos.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/T105ca75544ab3123-M81af7eb44fc23a3114fbbbd4 ------------------------------------------ illumos: illumos-discuss Permalink: https://illumos.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/T105ca75544ab3123-Mc39efbd3448c9c8fb518bb9b Delivery options: https://illumos.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/subscription
