I got that somewhat wrong. What's happening is SATA doesn't get asked that 
question, even if it's on a SCSI port (I have a USB-A 3.1 gen 2 or whatever to 
NVMe m.2 M key, and my laptop's internal swappable SATA drive is a Honda 
connector to dual PCIe m.2 M key, with a single M/B-keyed drive; two shows up 
as one to the firmware but ZFS can mirror); PCIe or NVMe M key on a SATA port 
will also not get asked the SMI/EFI question.



You'll wind up with 12.5 MiB Solaris Reserved because it's assumed that SATA is 
512b circle-not-square and that's how big one cylinder is.





The Wizard could gain +1 UEFI-lore point by asking if the user intends the 
drive in question to be a boot drive. Otherwise, you can easily wind up with 
non-illumos-bootable GPT partitioning, or non-UEFI w/o CSM MBR partitioning (a 
la Ventoy and Rufus btw), instead of PMBR. I'm using format to create and 
partition my boot drives nonetheless, and so far so good with non-PMBR GPT 
multiboot partitioning.




My forward-interop advice is not to use SATA for boot drives. I'm using lappy's 
internal bay as a 2TB ZFS mirror (using SK Hynix P31 gold ssd's) as my zone 
pool. External boot-to-RAM. Internal Compact Express slot has 128GB NVMe drive, 
and while this is technically a slower interface than SATA, effectively it's 
higher iops on non-sequential workloads, so it's my L2ARC as I only have 16GB 
of system RAM. My V110 Gen3 now outperforms my Gen7 on iops, albeit with higher 
power consumption (mostly due to being 7yo vs. 1yo equipment, I also have a 
Gen5 but it's out on long-term loan).



-Eric







---- On Sat, 29 Jun 2024 14:57:39 -0700 Eric J Bowman via illumos-discuss 
<[email protected]> wrote ---



> format> label 
> [0] SMI Label 
> [1] EFI Label 
> Specify Label type[1]: 



This dialog, when booted in protected mode (I never should have encountered it 
on my laptop), indicates CSM firmware present. The format utility won't allow 
SMI on UEFI w/o CSM mobos, +1 UEFI point for the kernel!

-Eric



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