zfs discuss - May 2010 - Virtual to physical migration

I had created a virtualbox VM to test out opensolaris. I updated to latest dev
build and set my things up. Tested pools and various configs/commands. Learnt
format/partition etc.

And then, I wanted to move this stuff to a solaris partition on the physical
disk. VB provides physical disk access. I put my solaris partition in there and
created slices for root, swap etc. in that partition inside the OpenSolaris VM.

Created a pool called mypool on slice 0 of this solaris partition and did a zfs
send|recv of my rpool/ROOT and rpool/export into the mypool. Verified that the
data was correctly copied and mountpoints were set exactly like they are for
rpool.

Next, edited the files in /mypool/boot and /mypool/etc to use the new name
mypool instead of rpool in the signature. Edited the menu.list where findroot
now finds the root in (pool_mypool,2,a) instead of (pool_rpool,0,a) because on
physical disk, solaris partition is the 3rd primary partition.

Did a installgrub to slice 0 of the solaris partition.
Got out of the VM and booted my machine.
It correctly gives me the grub menu for opensolaris but when I select, it shows
the opensolaris splash, moves the bar a bit and sits there.

So, my questions: 

1. How can turn the boot splash off to see what''s going on underneath?
ESC did not work.
2. Is there a log inside the mypool root fs that I can look at from a
OpenSolaris livecd, which will give me more information about what happened?

I am scrubbing the pool from livecd now. Will appreciate your help!
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This message posted from opensolaris.org

I think I messed up just a notch!

When I did zfs send|recv, I used the flag -u (because I wanted it to not mount
at that time). But it set the fs property canmount to off for ROOT...YAY!

I booted into livecd, imported the mypool and fixed the mount points and
canmount property. And I am now in the physical opensolaris install.

No X so far though...:(

Any hints on ATI drivers?
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This message posted from opensolaris.org

I am getting a strange reset as soon as I say startx from normal user''s
console login.

How do I troubleshoot this? Any ideas? I removed the /etc/X11/xorg.conf before
invoking startx because that would have some PCI bus ids in there which
won''t be valid in real hardware.
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This message posted from opensolaris.org

Looks like the X''s vesa driver can only use 1600x1200 resolution and
not the native 1920x1200.

And if I passed -dpi to enforce 96 DPI, it just croaks.

Once -dpi was out, I am inside X with 1600x1200 resolution.

Can anyone tell me how I can get the native 1920x1200 resolution working with
vesa driver? I know its possible because I get 1920x1200 resolution inside my
Milax liveUSB.
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This message posted from opensolaris.org

On 05/ 1/10 03:09 PM, devsk wrote:
> Looks like the X''s vesa driver can only use 1600x1200 resolution
and not the native 1920x1200.
>
>    
Asking these question on the ZFS list isn''t going to get you very far.
Troy the opensolaris-help list.

-- 
Ian.

I have no idea why I posted in zfs discuss...ok, migration...I will post follow
up in help.
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This message posted from opensolaris.org

This actually turned out be a lot of fun! The end of it is that I have a hard
disk partition now which can boot in both physical and virtual world (got rid of
the VDIs finally!). The physical world has outstanding performance but has ugly
graphics (1600x1200 vesa driver with weird DPI and fonts...ughhh) because ATI
drivers don''t work in Opensolaris for my card.

Virtualbox gives me better graphics than my real install. This is a bit of a
painful pill to swallow!

One thing I tested right away in the physical install was to see how portage
performance was compared to Linux. This is a sort of test of the scheduler as
well as small file performance of the FS. OpenSolaris emerged python-2.6.5 in 45
seconds compared to 55 seconds in Linux, cmake took 38 seconds vs 53 seconds in
Linux. In general, a portage operation (like emerge -pv <pkg>) completes
much much faster in OpenSolaris.

Its not to say OpenSolaris doesn''t have issues. I notice short freezes
(keyboard/mouse and gkrellm updates) lasting few seconds (sometimes more) during
FS activity. Firefox restart (like after an add-on install) takes forever
whereas it should be instant because all of it is in memory already. I would
like to troubleshoot these sometime using DTrace.

Lastly, OpenSolaris is memory hungry! It crawls without it. In the VM, I have it
using 1.5GB and pkg manager alone can eat more than half of it, throwing
everything else into swap.
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This message posted from opensolaris.org

You do know that OpenSolaris + VirtualBox can trash your ZFS raid? You can loose
your data. There is a post about write cache and ZFS and VirtualbBox, I think
you need to disable it?
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This message posted from opensolaris.org