ZFS On MacBook Pro
Mac fans now have two options for running ZFS, although only one of these supports ZFS boot today. After a day of running the new OpenSolaris Developer Preview on my AMD powered Gateway laptop, I decided to give it a spin on my Intel based laptop.
Interesting that you accomplished this. It would be nice if you said how you accomplished this magnificent feat. Did you use boot camp or is this truly bare metal?
A little help please...
Posted by Interested Dude on November 02, 2007 at 12:08 PM PDT #
Despite owning several Mac laptops, mostly for my kids, I'm not at all a Mac expert. Here is what I did:
- Installed Mac OS X Leopard
- Downloaded OpenSolaris Developer Preview and burnt ISO image onto a CD
- Inserted the CD
- Brought up system preferences and set startup device to CD (you can also reboot holding down the option key and it gives you a choice)
- Booted the live CD
Interestingly, when you hold down the option key and power up with the OpenSolaris CD loaded, you get two boxes to pick, one shows your hard drive and the other shows an icon labeled Windows. I guess Apple never thought there was any other OS someone might boot and hardcoded the Windows icon in. When selecting the OpenSolaris CD to boot from system preferences->startup, it correctly identifies the disc as "Foreign OS - OpenSolaris"
I have not yet played around to create a new partition and load it to disk.
Posted by Marc Hamilton on November 02, 2007 at 12:24 PM PDT #
It is interesting that OSDP contained drivers that correctly ran on the MBP. I had not thought it would and will have to check this out.
Another option is to install either Parallels or VMware Fusion (Fusion preferred because of the VMware tools you can install for Solaris 9 and 10 vms) and run OSDP inside a virtual machine. I have both booted from the OSDP iso as well as installed OSDP on to the vm. Sadly, networking is broken without installing the VMware tools which is a pain with this early preview. Hopefully this gets sorted out moving forward. The main thing is that OSDP runs natively on ZFS if that is what you are interested in.
Yet another option (a better one in many ways) is to install SXDE or SXCE on the vm. You get more functionality and stability (hopefully).
The great thing about the virtual machine approach is that all of this is occurring inside a window while running Mac OS X.
Evaluations are available for both Parallels and Fusion but I've tried both and prefer the later.
If I recall correctly Leopard allows RO access to ZFS file systems now.
Posted by Mac and Sun bigot on November 02, 2007 at 07:39 PM PDT #
Thanks for the comments. I've run SXDE on my PowerMac using http://www.virtualbox.org, a type 2 hypervisor similar to Fusion and Parallels, I like the fact that it is open source. This version of the OpenSolaris Developer Preview is not meant for general purpose use, it is really just a framework to bootstrap OS developers and packagers working with the new package system. We expect to have a more general purpose preview in early 2008.
Posted by Marc Hamilton on November 02, 2007 at 07:55 PM PDT #