[illumos-Discuss] multiboot-fu needed

[Garrett D'Amore]

On Wed, 2010-09-15 at 11:05 -0700, Mike Riley wrote:
> 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?

Yes.

> 
> 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.
> 

Its long since done. :-)  I think Shidokht played a major role there.

	- Garrett