Anybody ever start up smartos on one of these Xeon phi full systems? ebay.com/itm/185584398452

(Note, expensive old HW, not gonna buy, but interesting)

I think it will work, but I've never tried it myself.

danmcd: to confirm this is the platform that I should add from the latest release right? us-east.manta.joyent.com/Joyent_Dev…artOS/smartos.html#20221215T000744Z

also, I never moved our us-east- HNs to pool booting, do you have that tutorial somewhere or the instructions Think the HNs were on an older platform when I went to do it last time

Yes it's the right release.

As for a tutorial, I don't know if we have an explicit tutorial (maybe @bahamat published one?), but I can tell you that:

1.) I recommend a dedicate boot pool (not zones) for HNs.

2.) It's very important to know if your HN is BIOS booting or EFI booting. If EFI booting, the bootable pool must have an ESP on it (i.e. created with `zpool create -B...`.

3.) The bootable pool must be a simple, single-vdev one (single-disk, mirror, raidz... no slog or l2arc).

I recommend a dedicate boot pool (not zones) for HNs. what is the fear here?

The fear is that most production nodes have multi vdevs (slog or L2ARC) so they aren't bootable.

I may be conflating HN disk layout with CN disk layout, however.

Also most pools were created WITHOUT -B meaning no ESP, meaning no way to migrate to EFI booting.

ahhh I think we went through that

Went through what?

creating a new usb stick

and porting over so it could boot efi *

Oh... to be a loader one?

yea

Ahh, thanks. One CANNOT piadm activate unless the USB key is loader.

MY concern isn't with the USB key having loader (it MUST or else you can't migrate).

My concern is with the pool-to-be-blessed-as-bootable having an ESP (EFI System Partition) on it for EFI booting.

Were I deploying an HN in production myself, I'd Mirror a pair of larger SSDs for `zones` , and mirror a pair of smaller SSDs for `bootpool`. Basically what I have on Kebecloud's HN but mirrored-for-redundancy.

I'm neither subtle nor clever in this regard, I know.

Gotcha

we just have 1 big raidz2

In theory that's a bootable pool, BUT (and it's a big BUT) if that pool was created w/o `zpool create -B` you're stuck only being able to BIOS boot, not EFI boot.

is that a zone attr?

errr Pool attribute*

No.

But you can invoke: prtvtoc /dev/rdsk/<disk>

to see if it looks like it has an ESP.

Paste coming for what one with an ESP looks like...

See how partition 0 is 256MB and starts at sector 256 ?

THAT is the ESP (which is a DOS filesystem you can inspect with `mount -F pcfs...`).

Sectors 0-255 are the MBR for BIOS.

I think headnode layout is always mirror. It doesn't prompt you for the layout on a headnode, only on standalone SmartOS.

And for other compute nodes you can specify at setup time.

@Smithx10 added a without-ESP example.

Where does sparc/solaris load the kernel image from?

Or more accurately, whatever the system firmware was called on sparc

It's been a LONG time since I dealt with SPARC. I believe with a ZFS pool SPARC too loads from /platform/sun4<x>/sparcv9/<archive>.

@copec you probably wanna ask that on #illumos and someone with more SPARC experience (like ptribble) can answer better.