[OmniOS-discuss] A warning for upgraders with large numbers of BEs

[Dan McDonald]

Soon r151014 will be hitting the streets.  WHEN THAT DOES, I have to warn people, especially those jumping from r151006 to r151014 about a known issue in grub.

The illumos grub has serious memory management issues.  It cannot cope with too many boot environment (BE) entries.

The upper-limit on r151006 was ~60.  The upper-limit on r151014 is ~40.  If you upgrade an r151006 machine with 50 BEs to r151014, you may lose the ability to boot (but not your data or even rpool).

If you have more than 40 BEs on your rpool, I'd highly recommend trimming some back prior to an upgrade.  We've been (the illumos community, not just OmniOS) trying to figure out what to fix in grub, but it's opaque code at best.

The r151014 installation & upgrade page will have this warning as well, but I wanted to give the community a heads-up now, so you could prepare prior to the upgrade to r151014.

Dan