[illumos-Discuss] multiboot-fu needed

[Mike Riley]

On 09/15/10 00:13, Milan Jurik wrote:
> Hi Mike,
>
> Shesha putbacked PSARC/2006/379 Solaris on Extended partition last year
> in July.
>
> http://src.opensolaris.org/source/history/onnv/onnv-gate/usr/src/uts/common/io/scsi/targets/sd.c

Good to know it got in.

> Any reason why Solaris installations should occupy more "PC partitions"?

There is somewhat less reason that there used to be, but one example would be to have one fdisk 
partition be used for boot slices and one or more others be used for data partitions.  With 
disks getting as large as they are now people might want to do that, but with ZFS there really 
is no need any more.  It was a more common request when we had only UFS,

Plus format, unless they implemented the RFE I filed way back when, is limited to letting you 
configure only slices 0 to 7, even though X86 supports 16.  You can (could?) only configure the 
other slices using fmthard, and you could only see them with prtvtoc.  Also, slices 2 and 8 had 
standard uses you should not change.

Slice 2 is expected by many pieces of software to cover the entire disk.  Slice 8 can be re-used 
for data if the disk is never used for booting.

Another unique slice was slice 9, but only for IDE hard disks.  They reserved it for keeping 
spare sectors in, but that is back from the days of ST-506 drives when we didn't have 
intelligent disks that managed their own bad sectors.  It is another artifact that I hope they 
have eliminated with the re-write to eliminate the disk geometry.

Mike