> Installation into a disk partition

The default for Tribblix installation (with the -G flag to live_install.sh) is to use the whole disk. While this is the preferred way to install Tribblix, it's possible to create partitions on the disk. The aim here would be to support the installation of multiple operating systems simultaneously.

The Tribblix installer is not (yet) itself capable of partitioning of the disk that Tribblix is installed to. If you need to partition the disk, you'll need to partition it outside the installer.

Terminology

An important note on terminology. On illumos (as in Solaris) there are two terms that are used to describe how a disk is split up. These are partitions and slices. Sadly these are often used as if they're interchangeable, but to avoid confusion:

• A partition is the highest level. On x86, with traditional disk labelling (MBR), there can only be 4 primary partitions (or 3 primary and one partition with extended partitions). On illumos, the device names corresponding to these are p0 for the whole disk and p1 through p4 for these 4 partitions.
• With modern GPT labelling of disks, the limit of 4 partitions no longer applies.
• Inside an MBR primary partition, illumos can have a secondary level of splitting the disk up into slices. That's what the device names ending in s0 through s15 refer to.

Tools

There are two tools on illumos that manage partitions and slices.

• The fdisk command manages primary partitions using MBR labelling, and can create a single top-level GPT partition.
• The format command manages slices within an MBR partition, and partitions on a GPT-labelled disk. In both cases, format unhelpfully uses the term partition.

MBR labelling

With MBR labelled disks, there has to be exactly one solaris or solaris2 partition. The fdisk command can create and manage those partitions. In particular, the command

fdisk -B /dev/rdsk/cXtYdZp0

will create a single solaris partition that uses all the disk. If you want to leave space for other partitions, or you've already partitioned it with another tool, then simply allocate the space you need and set the type of the partition you want to use for Tribblix to solaris.

With that in place, the format command can be used to configure the slices. To do this, select the disk in format, then p to enter the partition editor, and then p to show the table and the numeric id of a slice to edit it. You'll need to give a tag (which is mostly unused), flags (wm for anything you're going to use), the starting cylinder, and a size. One nice feature is that you give give the end cylinder with e which is the only way to be precise. I use p to show the table every time I edit anything, then once you're happy l to write a new label to the disk. In most cases, if you're using ZFS, then you should set up slice s0 to the maximum size. Then run the installer as

./live_install.sh cXtYdZs0

and, without the -G flag it will use the disk exactly as it finds it.

GPT labelling

If you use the -G flag with the live_install.sh script then a ZFS pool will be created that fills the whole disk. This actually creates 2 partitions, a small system partition and a 2nd partition that uses the rest of the space.

To split things up, then you still need the system partition which has to be big enough to create a FAT filesystem (pcfs) on it. If the disk has already been partitioned by some other system, you'll almost certainly already have this. If you're partitioning the disk from scratch, then you'll need to first allocate the whole disk

fdisk -E /dev/rdsk/cXtYdZp0

which simply puts a single EFI partition on the disk.

With that in place, the format command can be used to configure individual partitions, only this time you need to invoke it in expert mode with format -e. The first thing to do is create a small partition (256MB is always big enough, usually 64MB is fine), and it must have type system.

Then you can create your partitions for data. For example, you can create partition 5 with the space you want to allocate for Tribblix. Again, use the p option to show what you have, and l to write the label. In this case, make sure it's EFI and not SMI (which is the old style).

And to install to the specific partition number 5,

./live_install.sh cXtYdZs5

and, just like with an MBR label, without the -G flag it will use the disk exactly as it finds it.

IMPORTANT: Note that illumos and Solaris count from 0. Some other partition editors start counting from 1. Make sure (by running format -e to examine the partition table before running the installer, for example) that you're sure you're installing to the partition you expect.

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