On Mon, 1 Jul 2024 at 20:41, Eric J Bowman via illumos-discuss
<[email protected]> wrote:
> 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.
I think there is some confusion here about the form factor (M.2) and
the interface (NVMe, SATA, etc). At any rate, as I said earlier, you
get the menu if you invoke "format -e". Otherwise, you don't get the
menu:
https://src.illumos.org/source/xref/illumos-gate/usr/src/cmd/format/menu_command.c?r=96d99ca9#1558-1586
I don't believe any of this is based on the kind of firmware your
system has, the mode in which you are booted, or anything in
particular about the disk you're using. The one caveat is that large
drives get a GPT/EFI label by default, and smaller drives (for
backwards compatibility) still get the old style MBR/VTOC label,
unless you use "format -e" to request a GPT/EFI label.
> 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.
I don't believe this is true. SATA disks can have a variety of
reported block sizes; e.g., 4096 bytes. I would expect every SATA
device that exists to use LBA; any mention of cylinders at this point
is vestigial.
> My forward-interop advice is not to use SATA for boot drives.
SATA drives work just fine for booting.
Cheers.
--
Joshua M. Clulow
http://blog.sysmgr.org
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