[OmniOS-discuss] Can't reinstall OmniOS on CF drive

[Eric Sproul]

On Fri, Mar 29, 2013 at 11:32 AM, Kent Watsen <kent at watsen.net> wrote:
> I've started to try the Kayak suggestion but have so far failed - the first
> laptop didn't have enough memory (it had 127MB, no idea what's needed)

127MB is almost certainly not enough.

> on the second laptop (a T400), OmniOS couldn't recognize its network
> interface - not good so a machine that's suppose to act as a server ;)

Laptops aren't the target platform.  OmniOS is aimed at servers, and
that means server-class hardware.  Luckily there is often sufficient
overlap in hardware support that things like desktops and laptops
generally work, but YMMV.

> The crazy thing is, I have no idea how flexible the Kayak installer is - I
> read that it has ZFS compression on by default, but what is it going to do
> for helping me install on this CF?

Putting aside the fact that CF seems a poor choice for an OS install
(slow, outdated IDE interface, poor random I/O performance), Kayak
puts some practical bounds on swap and dump volumes, and just won't
create them if the rpool is too small.

Nevertheless, I'm curious what Kayak would do with your device.  The
MakeSwapDump() function
(http://omnios.omniti.com/file.php/core/kayak/disk_help.sh#l128) is
where the calculation happens.  Kayak tries to make each of the swap
and dump volumes equal to 25% of physical memory, with a minimum of
1GB.  It then tries to see whether, with at least 2GB of swap/dump
reservations, there would still be a minimum of 10G free on the rpool
for the OS install and future updates.  Right there, we fail, and will
not make either swap or dump volumes on your 8G CF card.  The install
would proceed without them.

Eric