Re: Partition limit on Solaris disk drives

According to Darren Dunham <ddunham@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
DoN. Nichols <dnichols@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
According to Darren Dunham <ddunham@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
There's no legacy of OBP on x86, so Solaris on x86 platforms does
address 16 slices on a VTOC partition.

Hmm ...

Popocat:csu 23:31:55 # df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/wd0a 502M 43.4M 433M 9% /

[ ... ]

/dev/wd0k 9.8G 1.6G 7.7G 18% /var/www/htdocs/misc
======================================================================

And a single IDE drive with 13 active partitions, plus the swap
partition and the "whole drive" partition (/dev/wd0c).

Granted -- that is an IDE drive, not a SCSI, but you did not
limit it to SCSI drives in your statement above.

No, IDE/SCSI should be identical here.

I thought so, but was not sure.

But it is an UltraSPARC system, and it boots nicely. (Granted,
I don't try to boot from a partition beyond the first one -- that might
indeed present problems.)

I don't know enough about the BSD layout to know. There's several
different things that could be happening.

Is it possible for you to boot this system from either a Solaris
"liveCD" or installtion media? If so, does 'format'/'prtvtoc' show 8
slices identical to the first 8 of BSD, or something else?

I don't want to take the system down at the moment for the test,
as it is a web server, but I do remember that when I tried to look at an
OpenBSD disk from the partition option of format on a Solaris system it
really did not like it. :-) I forget whether it even let me get as far
as "partition". :-)

I can't tell from my machine what the OBP thinks about booting from
them. I get the same message from it when I boot from a "real" slice
that's not bootable (:b) as I do when I give it a "fake" slice (:z).

Not exactly the most helpful information. :-)

/usr/include/sys/isa_defs.h has these comments:

* _SUNOS_VTOC_8 / _SUNOS_VTOC_16 / _SVR4_VTOC_16:
* This specifies the form of the disk VTOC (or label):
*
* _SUNOS_VTOC_8:
* This is a VTOC form which is upwardly compatible with the
* SunOS 4.x disk label and allows 8 partitions per disk.
*
* _SUNOS_VTOC_16:
* In this format the incore vtoc image matches the ondisk
* version. It allows 16 slices per disk, and is not
* compatible with the SunOS 4.x disk label.

Thus the complaint from Solaris' format program. :-)

* Note that these are not the only two VTOC forms possible and
* additional forms may be added. One possible form would be the
* SVr4 VTOC form. The symbol for that is reserved now, although
* it is not implemented.
*
* _SVR4_VTOC_16:
* This VTOC form is compatible with the System V Release 4
* VTOC (as implemented on the SVr4 Intel and 3b ports) with
* 16 partitions per disk.

So rather than being an OBP thing, it may just be more a matter of SunOS
4.x compatibility that remains.

I suspect so.

[ ... ]

Got some Dr Pepper? San Francisco, CA bay area

I remember when I came up from South Texas to the Washingon DC
area, Dr. Pepper was quite difficult to find -- and when I did, my
sister complained that it tasted like carbonated prune juice to her. :-)

Enjoy,
DoN.

--
Email: <dnichols@xxxxxxxxxxx> | Voice (all times): (703) 938-4564
(too) near Washington D.C. | http://www.d-and-d.com/dnichols/DoN.html
--- Black Holes are where God is dividing by zero ---
.

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