is it possible to have the installer patched to use the i226 ports in passthrought and the admin net on localhost?

you can probably create the admin on an etherstub, then have a vm with a vnic in the etherstub and the i226 as a ppt device

not sure smartos will boot like that thoigh

If your bhyve that's handling I226 can cope with bridging two nics (etherstub and I226), you should be able to do okay, as long as any I226-adjacent (netstub) VMs don't need off-link early.

This is not much different than my HDC setup, where my router is a native zone, but on a different physical link (igb1 vs. igb0). Also my router zone does ARP-lying/proxy-ARP for remote-access guests which get addrs from the internal network block.

I think you could PPT an I226 to a VM xmerlin. I have no idea, however, how to do this directly in the installer. I can imagine a lot of manual setup.

Sorry that isn't 100% helpful.

I wish someone not (me or rm) ( == not me and not rm , thanks demorgan) had cycles to port igc(4D) into illumos. IIRC igc isn't much different from e1000g/igb so stealing ideas from those two, combining with the Intel Common Code (like $UTS/common/io/e1000api/ in illumos) for igc.

danmcd, Is it possible to fix the installer to complete the installation using the localhost interface ?

I don't know xmerlin. I can imagine a few ways to trick it but I'd have to try them out and I can't right now because I'm gearing up for meeting-Wednesday plus release-branch tonight.

I do wonder if you can get a shell-escape and, for installer purposes, create an etherstub and GZ vnic for it (per sjorge), and see if the installer's network-detection will recognize it on a 2nd pass.

Like I said, I've no time to test that right now.

danmcd, I can try ...how can I invoke the installer from the console?

Oh...

I thought you were installing fresh.

I'm installing fresh but the installer stops because it cannot find the network interface

so I need to execute it from the console after creating a fake network interface

Does the installer let you exit the shell and it tries again?

the installer is not executed ...I can login using root and the generated password

So use that shell time to create an etherstub and a vnic on top of it (see dladm(8)). Check the svcs -xv, you may merely need to restart the halted service after using dladm.

ok

(smartdc/config possibly)

Yes, smartdc/config

thank you