[illumos-Discuss] multiboot-fu needed

[Mike Riley]

On 09/15/10 07:45, Garrett D'Amore wrote:
> On Tue, 2010-09-14 at 22:37 -0700, Mike Riley wrote:
>
>>
>> There was a project to take the handling of partitions, and disk geometry, completely out of sd
>> and impose it as a layer above it.  That way the new layer would handle knowledge of disk
>> layouts and provide sd with a simple starting sector, sector size, and total sectors info to
>> work with.  Again, it was being worked on back when I was with Sun, but I am not sure it ever
>> got anywhere.  I know several of the people working on it at the time are no longer with Sun, so
>> my guess is that it died.  Pity, because it is really needed, but it also is fraught with the
>> possibility of bugs being introduced.  However, sd is so full of bugs right now I am not sure a
>> re-write/re-design would be any worse.
>
> That project is basically done.  The code has been moved into "cmlb",
> which handles all the details of partitioning, and labeling, etc.  It is
> a library with functions that the target driver (sd, or cmdk, or other
> similar drivers) can call.

Glad to hear it.  But did they change sd, cmdk, etc. to use it yet?

I know they were dreading trying to do that and no one group at Sun wanted to take 
responsibility for sd.  I had to get votes of approval from at least 3 groups to get a change in 
that I did to it so that larger drives could be handled.  That fix was only supposed to be a 
band-aid until the code was changed to eliminate the need for disk geometry in sd.

-- 


Mike Riley                                                       o
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