[OmniOS-discuss] Boot from mirrored USB?

[Jim Klimov]

On 2013-11-01 19:03, alka wrote:
> Sadly I cannot help to overcome this behaviour.
> If one could plugin any bootable device in any slot
> (sata, ide or usb) and it would bootup just like
> plain old stupid DOS with the bios bootup order-
> that would be a huge improvement in handling -
> allowing " preconfigured deploy and emergency disks"
>
> I really hope someone with more Grub knowledge
> is willing to look at this item as well and help to fix it.


See if Alex Eremin's revival of Failsafe Boot helps for such cases?
http://alexeremin.blogspot.ru/2013/05/firefly-failsafe-image-for-illumos.html

AFAIK, this should use GRUB to load a failsafe miniroot into RAM
from the provided filesystem (including from ZFS), and does not
rely on the kernel rpool import at all.

The project is distributed as ISO and USB images, but according
to comments, the former can be unpacked and files from it can be
used from grub:

# Download ISO, unpack ISO and copy files to boot-url
# The ramdisk is compressed with gzip, which must be unpacked
# to work with iPXE
# mv firefly firefly.gz
# gunzip firefly.gz
kernel ${base-url}/platform/i86pc/kernel/amd64/unix
module ${base-url}/firefly

Hmm... I don't think I've after all tried this with my laptop...

And I don't think that the image building recipe was described
or opensourced either, as this was a PoC release...

//Jim