[geeks] OpenSolaris on T105

[Shannon Hendrix]

On May 9, 2008, at 13:28 , Lionel Peterson wrote:

>> From: Shannon Hendrix <shannon at widomaker.com>
>> Date: 2008/05/09 Fri AM 10:09:44 CDT
>> To: The Geeks List <geeks at sunhelp.org>
>> Subject: Re: [geeks] OpenSolaris on T105
>
>> On May 9, 2008, at 10:43 , Lionel Peterson wrote:
>>
>>>> From: Sevan / Venture37 <venture37 at hotmail.com>
>>>> Date: 2008/05/08 Thu AM 02:24:43 CDT
>>>> To: geeks at sunhelp.org
>>>> Subject: [geeks] OpenSolaris on T105
>>>
>>>> Hi Guys
>>>> Have any of you managed to install any builds of OpenSolaris on a
>>>> PowerEdge
>>>> T105 using a DVD??
>>>>> From the brief search around I've done it seems that OpenSolaris
>>>>> doesn't like
>>>> the sata dvdrw drive in the system, which I presume leaves me with
>>>> just doing
>>>> a netinstall?
>>>> So far I've tried b79 & b89 (I think) & both have bombed out on
>>>> startup.
>>>
>>> When you say "doesn't like the sata drive" do you really mean the  
>>> on-
>>> board sata controller or the actual drive itself?
>>
>> It's the controller, or rather the Solaris driver for it.
>>
>> Solaris Nevada dropped support for SATA optical drives in the new
>> nforce driver.
>
> That's odd...

The old nforce driver operated in legacy mode.  It was not really an  
nforce driver.  Most chipsets can run this way with few changes to a  
basic ATA driver.

Then they worked on the real nforce driver and while it supports SATA  
hard drives, it still does not have SATA CD/DVD support.  It seems to  
be the ATAPI layer that is wrong/missing.

Hard drives are using AHCI so they work fine.

Still... it does seem that the driver would have been written to drop  
into the old driver's legacy mode if something went wrong.

Most Linux and BSD drivers seem to operate like that.

> Wee! That's a relief. I'll have to give mine a try this weekend - I  
> threw Windows server eval on it, but I haven't turned it on for a  
> few weeks, so I guess I should clobber it and start over again with  
> something new ;^)

Please note: I'm partially assuming here, because I was able to boot  
the DVD, but have not yet updated with it.

I was waiting to see if I could try Nevada.

I'm actually happy with the official release, except for one thing: I  
really would like to have support for data copies in ZFS.

-- 
Shannon Hendrix
shannon at widomaker.com