Sunday December 23, 2007 Alan Perry's Blog
Sunday December 23, 2007 Wasn't I doing this same thing a year ago?
Last year, I bought myself a Mac Mini was spending the winter break (Sun shuts down between the Christmas and New Year holidays) getting Solaris running on it. With some help from BootCamp, this mostly involved looking for drivers, writing drivers and porting applications.
Oh, and also spending hour upon hour trying to figure out how to set up dual-boot (Solaris and MacOS) in a manner that was reproducible and didn't depend on old data being left on the disk from a previous attempt to set it up.
This year, on the Thursday before the winter break, a new MacBook showed up on my doorstep and I found myself trying to get Solaris running on it.
So, was it any easier than a year ago?
Surprisingly, at least initially, it was not. I was trying to install Solaris Nevada build 76 on the MacBook. I found an updated blog by Paul Mitchell describing how he installed build 76 on a MacBook Pro. His work on this was based on a blog that I wrote describing the process that I came up with a year ago working with the Mac Mini. I figured that I was set.
However, it didn't work.
Before I found Paul's blog, I found another blog that described how to install Solaris on a Mac. If you plan on dual-booting the system, I would not recommend following the procedure describing in it, because it blew away the disk's GPT and I had to reinstall the MacBook from scratch.
Paul's instructions consist of creating a Solaris2 partition in the MBR, changing the tag on the EFI partition so that Solaris thinks that it is something else, applying the CR6413235 workaround and running the Solaris install program. When I did this, I still had issues, but it was less destructive than the first time through.
Instead of strictly doing as Paul indicated, I used BootCamp to repartition the disk. I did use his instructions to allocate the Solaris2 partition while preserving the unallocated space after the HFS+ partition. However, Solaris would always use the MBR partition table as the VTOC.
For some reason, I figured that I would download build 80 (not sure if that is available outside of Sun as I write this) and give that a try. I had no particular reason to believe that it would work any differently than build 76. It was just something to try. And it worked!
I booted build 80 and ran prtvtoc and it showed an empty VTOC, not the MBR partition table contents. I was encouraged. I ran format and was able to configure the VTOC as I had planned. I installed the CR6413235 workaround and restarted install-solaris and it ran to completion.
Actually, it seems as if build 80 would have worked as described in Paul's blog. I wonder if he was using a later build.
Now if I could only find a Marvell Yukon driver that works with the Ethernet part in my MacBook ...
( Dec 23 2007, 09:46:13 AM PST ) Permalink Comments [5]
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You'll save a lot of time if you just partition the disk into whatever OS X is using (don't remember now), and then turn the 2nd partition into "Solaris 2", 100%, then slice it up as you see fit.
We did this with snv_77 and it worked like a charm. We used Solaris's fdisk(1M) to do this.
Dual booting was achieved by holding the comical "Apple key that looks like a train track" and I think it was "c". Then the bootcamp comes with "OS X" and "Windows" hard disk icons. Click on Windows and Solaris boots away.
The driver is Marvel yukonx, and it won't attach until reboot. devfsadm(1M) didn't help.
Atheros driver is reportedly unstable, with breaking the PSK connection and taking very long time to renegotiate, making it pretty much unusable.
Other than that, snv_77 worked lovely on that Mac.
Posted by UX-admin on December 23, 2007 at 11:38 AM PST #
I like rEFIt better than the Apple boot manager. I am not enough of an Apple geek to remember all of the key sequences to do Apple start up things. Besides, I can rebuilt rEFIt so I don't have to look at a Windows (or Linux) logo.
As far as the yukonx driver, something is up with it. Even after I added the PCI id for the part in my MacBook and it still doesn't work.
Posted by Alan Perry on December 23, 2007 at 04:56 PM PST #
rEFIt rendered our system unbootable. So much so, we've had to restore with booting from the DVD and the time machine.
I'd stay away from rEFIt.
Posted by UX-admin on December 24, 2007 at 01:48 AM PST #
And regarding yukonx, yes Marvell/SysKonnect make extremely crappy drivers. For instance, I have two SKG 9521 NICs and the driver keeps bouncing the link up and down like a yo-yo.
Seems to me that those guys aren't very competent when it comes to drivers, especially Solaris drivers. If one just looks at their "package", their incompetence/inexperience with Solaris becomes painfully obvious. For example: their package is interactive, which is really a sin when doing packaging.
Posted by UX-admin on December 24, 2007 at 01:51 AM PST #
Well, we are certainly at different ends of the spectrum of experience here. I have never had a problem with rEFIt and I can't make the Marvell yukonx driver work with my MacBook (the 32-bit version is working with my Mac Mini).
However, I have committed to (finally) get MythTV working under Solaris over the winter break, not get networking up on the MacBook, so figuring out the Marvell problem will need to wait!
Posted by Alan Perry on December 25, 2007 at 11:22 PM PST #