Hello,

I've just installed OpenSolaris 2009.06 on my Lenovo W510. I need drivers for 
either Intel 82577LM (ethernet) or Centrino Ultimate-N 6300 (WiFi) to upgrade 
my system. That's a chicken-and-egg problem. :-)

I thought network cards emulated by qemu could "just work" and tried to solve 
this by creating a virtual disk with the same structure as the physical one and booting 
from it under qemu-kvm. (The virtual disk consists of a physical partition with Solaris 
prefixed by a loopback partition with a MBR and a partition table. The two partitions are 
combined into a linear software RAID volume.)

GRUB works perfectly fine on the virtual disk. It can see partitions and slices 
normally. Unfortunately, Qemu can't emulate SATA (AHCI). That's why OpenSolaris 
panics when booted from the virtual machine. I booted with -kv to see what 
happens:

The kernel attempts to find the root filesystem here: 
/p...@0,0/pci17aa,2...@1f,2/d...@0,0:a
The virtual machine exposes the disk as an IDE drive: 
/p...@0,0/pci-...@1,1/i...@0/c...@0,0

How could I tell the kernel to use IDE instead of SATA when running on the VM? 
Should I use VirtualBox instead and emulate AHCI there? Are there other 
possibilities? Could I have two boot environments on the ZFS filesystem, one 
for AHCI and one for IDE? (If so, how do I set this up?) Are there any kernel 
boot options that could override the default root device selection?

It's easy to mount the pool from another system and edit the vfstab (or 
whatever else) when necessary. So the root device selection is the only problem 
I need to solve to get this running. :-) Just about any piece of advice would 
be very helpful. BTW, is there an overview of OS/Net kernel boot options 
somewhere on the web?

Cheers!

Andrej

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