Remove distro.iso support for IDE CD Players.

Remove distro.iso support for IDE CD Players.

[Eric J Bowman]

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UEFI with no CSM (excluding CSM "disabled" in "BIOS") sees "Solaris Boot" or "FreeBSD Boot" when looking for a partition to boot; this isn't a MBR, so all it can do is boot the drive. Without CSM to tell it how to legacy boot a drive in 32-bit protected mode, the 16-bit real-mode boot proceeds from the 8088 running MINIX whence it (likely) came, with but one exception: PMBR.

Now your installer's running in 16-bit protected mode... so when it goes to write gptzfsboot... it's really zfsboot... because it doesn't thnk the system speaks 32-bit UEFI, although it is similar to the language used by a binary moisture evaporator, or so I'm told.

My "computer museum" (glorified shed) contains my old Packard-Bell 386, from the days when I was porting my code to protected mode, and couldn't boot DOS or Windows or Netware from the "CDROM" which was really a CD Player with an IDE interface. So I had to buy what's been my office doorstop for 25 years, 100% functional uptime and quite the conversation piece, says "NEC" on it and has a SCSI interface, only a brick due to lack of adapterability.

Little did I know until now, that at that time, I could've booted BSD/Solaris from my Packard Bell's internal CD Player.

The reason that, alone of all Ubuntu distros, Bodhi fails the same way as, alone of all Solaris distros, XStreamOS-Chandra? They forgot to -no-emul when they El Torito'd. When you dd distro.iso to a partition, you get an empty partition and no error message, because the firmware doesn't know about 3.5" floppy images, so the OS routes the write right to /dev/null and dd reports a successful write, right? ;-)

It's time to relegate this hack to the dustbin of history, if there's any room left in there with all those AOL CD's it enabled, and get with the UEFI program. This issue causes folks to just move on, and reinforce the word-on-the-street that FreeBSD and Solaris are obsolete relics which don't comply with UEFI when really, it's just the distro.iso's.

Back to GhostBSD... In the "multiboot community" which includes Rufus, Ventoy, Etcher, list goes on, compatibility lists exclude all other FreeBSD/Solaris distros "because FreeBSD/Solaris" for underlying "UEFI reasons" belied by GhostBSD's presence in Ventoy, which nobody will tell you comes down to it's /EFI not /efi BUT there you have it. When EFI came along, /EFI went through the same lowercase() as /boot, because part of the hack from back when a bunch of bigwigs got high together in the sierras was breaking FAT with /boot *deliberately* and now that UEFI mandates vFAT compliance, it's /EFI/boot.

The only reason GhostBSD only installs properly for me from Ventoy, is that Ventoy copied the hack that Linux uses to launch their kernel in PXE, which I didn't realize how worked until lately because I'm not into Linux, but immediately recognize as the ol' QEMM A20-kbd-interrupt-your-way-into-protected-mode hack... and Linux folks are saying Solaris is obsolete? Good grief, all y'all need to quit arguing, because after over a decade away from IT and 15 from Solaris, I come back and find my problems result from everyone's still using 1980's hacks. Stop it! :-)

Also, OmniOS CE fails interoperability the same way as Alpine Linux, by using a " " in what's effectively a DOS filename. Because mkisofs isn't the only tool that won't bitch about that, thinking you're burning an Audio CD.

So there's a clear choice to be made in the Solaris and FreeBSD worlds (Net and Open don't use this hack), moving forward with UEFI or sticking with supporting CD Player boot, you can't have it both ways.

-Eric

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Re: [discuss] Remove distro.iso support for IDE CD Players.

[Till Wegmüller]

Hi Eric

Interesting, I did not know that much about the ISO/Disk image 
background. We would very much want support for that kind of boot. Newer 
tools such as Image builder https://github.com/illumos/image-builder do 
support the output of hybrid ISO's IIRC (please correct me if it does 
not) but slim_source needs some patches. If you can provide me with a 
patch for 
https://github.com/OpenIndiana/slim_source/blob/oi/hipster/usr/src/cmd/distro_const/utils/create_iso 
I'll gladly include it. We would also need a patch for the /usr mounting 
of the embedded solaris.zlib files since those are located on different 
places in the USB and ISO images from the live environments point of view.

As for OmniOS, I am sure they are happy about a Patch to 
https://github.com/omniosorg/kayak to add support.

In Summary we are very Interested in Hybrid ISO support and would love 
some patches for our shellscripts to enable that. If you or anybody who 
wants to work on that wants to submit patches but needs some guidance, 
we have a weekly CoWorking session on Sunday 17:00 CEST for OpenIndiana 
where I can help with that. Or You can also mail me, or write in the 
list or in the fediverse under #illumos.

Greetings
Till

On 04.06.24 01:48, Eric J Bowman via illumos-discuss wrote:
> UEFI with no CSM (excluding CSM "disabled" in "BIOS") sees "Solaris 
> Boot" or "FreeBSD Boot" when looking for a partition to boot; this isn't 
> a MBR, so all it can do is boot the drive. Without CSM to tell it how to 
> legacy boot a drive in 32-bit protected mode, the 16-bit real-mode boot 
> proceeds from the 8088 running MINIX whence it (likely) came, with but 
> one exception: PMBR.
> 
> Now your installer's running in 16-bit protected mode... so when it goes 
> to write gptzfsboot... it's really zfsboot... because it doesn't thnk 
> the system speaks 32-bit UEFI, although it is similar to the language 
> used by a binary moisture evaporator, or so I'm told.
> 
> My "computer museum" (glorified shed) contains my old Packard-Bell 386, 
> from the days when I was porting my code to protected mode, and couldn't 
> boot DOS or Windows or Netware from the "CDROM" which was really a CD 
> Player with an IDE interface. So I had to buy what's been my office 
> doorstop for 25 years, 100% functional uptime and quite the conversation 
> piece, says "NEC" on it and has a SCSI interface, only a brick due to 
> lack of adapterability.
> 
> Little did I know until now, that at that time, I could've booted 
> BSD/Solaris from my Packard Bell's internal CD Player.
> 
> The reason that, alone of all Ubuntu distros, Bodhi fails the same way 
> as, alone of all Solaris distros, XStreamOS-Chandra? They forgot to 
> -no-emul when they El Torito'd. When you dd distro.iso to a partition, 
> you get an empty partition and no error message, because the firmware 
> doesn't know about 3.5" floppy images, so the OS routes the write right 
> to /dev/null and dd reports a successful write, right? ;-)
> 
> It's time to relegate this hack to the dustbin of history, if there's 
> any room left in there with all those AOL CD's it enabled, and get with 
> the UEFI program. This issue causes folks to just move on, and reinforce 
> the word-on-the-street that FreeBSD and Solaris are obsolete relics 
> which don't comply with UEFI when really, it's just the distro.iso's.
> 
> Back to GhostBSD... In the "multiboot community" which includes Rufus, 
> Ventoy, Etcher, list goes on, compatibility lists exclude all other 
> FreeBSD/Solaris distros "because FreeBSD/Solaris" for underlying "UEFI 
> reasons" belied by GhostBSD's presence in Ventoy, which nobody will tell 
> you comes down to it's /EFI not /efi BUT there you have it. When EFI 
> came along, /EFI went through the same lowercase() as /boot, because 
> part of the hack from back when a bunch of bigwigs got high together in 
> the sierras was breaking FAT with /boot *deliberately* and now that UEFI 
> mandates vFAT compliance, it's /EFI/boot.
> 
> The only reason GhostBSD only installs properly for me from Ventoy, is 
> that Ventoy copied the hack that Linux uses to launch their kernel in 
> PXE, which I didn't realize how worked until lately because I'm not into 
> Linux, but immediately recognize as the ol' QEMM 
> A20-kbd-interrupt-your-way-into-protected-mode hack... and Linux folks 
> are saying Solaris is obsolete? Good grief, all y'all need to quit 
> arguing, because after over a decade away from IT and 15 from Solaris, I 
> come back and find my problems result from everyone's still using 1980's 
> hacks. Stop it! :-)
> 
> Also, OmniOS CE fails interoperability the same way as Alpine Linux, by 
> using a " " in what's effectively a DOS filename. Because mkisofs isn't 
> the only tool that won't bitch about that, thinking you're burning an 
> Audio CD.
> 
> So there's a clear choice to be made in the Solaris and FreeBSD worlds 
> (Net and Open don't use this hack), moving forward with UEFI or sticking 
> with supporting CD Player boot, you can't have it both ways.
> 
> -Eric
> 
> 
> *illumos <https://illumos.topicbox.com/latest>* / illumos-discuss / see 
> discussions <https://illumos.topicbox.com/groups/discuss> + participants 
> <https://illumos.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/members> + delivery options 
> <https://illumos.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/subscription> Permalink 
> <https://illumos.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/T105ca75544ab3123-M81af7eb44fc23a3114fbbbd4>

Re: [discuss] Remove distro.iso support for IDE CD Players.

[Eric J Bowman]

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Our "distro packager" is one line of code, which can't be patched. It hasn't changed since I last copy-pasted it, except now it lives in Oracle Solaris 11 documentation. I recognized it immediately when I saw it on Peter's YT presentation. I could not find it in the OpenIndiana or illumos documentation. May it RIP after 25 years of service. Only SmartOS doesn't use it; only Chandra removes -no-emul from it.



What I mean by "serendipitous re-use" also applies to fostering more distros. Look how Canonical leveraged Ubuntu's success, and understand how it went according to plan. What they did was focus on their distro packager / installer. While I was gone, the "two flavors of Linux, RPM and Debian" morphed into "RPM and Ubuntu" and has anyone noticed that the proliferation of new Linux distros over the past few years, have almost entirely been Ubuntu? Except the only one I use, which is Bodhi, which is switching to Debian proper -- Ubuntu is Debian, after all.



Ventoy didn't exist three years ago. Its very existence is proof of serendipitous re-use coming about from simplifying distro packaging and gaining UEFI compliance. However, they have erred in sector-aligning to 4K, which is not required; what's hard-coded in Linux kernel is 4K blocksize, regardless of fs, so even if ZFS was in the kernel it wouldn't be of much use; same for btrfs, it's only limited to 4K on Linux.



I have a shorter followup response in the works, with downloadable .iso example, which contains six distro.iso's in a multiboot configuration:



Zephix

Bodhi

OpenMandriva

GhostBSD

MidnightBSD

OpenIndiana



Only Zephix works out-of-the-box; it has no padding. It will be happy in whatever size partition you put it in. If you select "persistence module" from GRUB, the extra space is writable, but can't be read when the default module is booted. If I were to alter their distro.iso, it would be to make Budgie the default desktop environment. Moksha's cool, but it took forever to crack Bodhi's distro.iso problems, after first cracking FreeBSD's.



Hipster, I've only half solved; I had to use a "manual stanza" in the manual.conf file. The final line in config.conf is "include manual.conf", comment it out and help me figure out why that breaks it?



That won't fix ROME, which remains a total basket case. I can't give up on any of these distros. I came up with "Solaris Qubes" well before I came across Zephix, the only problems with which are it doesn't grok Zones or have ZFS support in the kernel, but the ideas are solid. My Bodhi VMware install dates all the way back; the official Bisonix desktop was e17 (unless it was 19 lol), my first contribution to Tribblix will be Moksha desktop, my own distro builds from there and makes interesting use of ETK and framebuffer.



GhostBSD's there because this all started when I couldn't delete their distro.iso, and turned out to install but not entirely work, reporting "alignment errors" due to real mode, just like illumoseses. Midnight's there because, like Mandrake, they both kinda-sorta work on my Rockchip 5 despite being built for Rockchip 4. Hipster's there because flagship. The PNG font I've created, "sun_gallant_demi.png", represents a labor of love in tribute to what once was, before ever I touched it or I wouldn't have had a TTF. The gallant.png floating around out there is 12pt raster, requiring a magnifying glass to see at today's dot pitches, and can't be scaled by the UEFI firmware and software that groks font.png format. Subset of ASCII formatted just so, in black, transparent background, max glyph width=96px. Can be colored.



SmartOS, despite being out-of-the-box compatible, is not included because under my partitioning (which isn't technically required for this project but is what I've got going in general) I can only have six distro.iso's and theirs isn't a desktop environment. I will be releasing a re-pack of smartos.iso shortly. Since the MD5 breaks when the .iso is resized to fit 64K sector alignment, I figure why not make the one change it needs beyond that to be uber-compatible with everything -- rename one .png file. That's my model for otherwise being included in my multi-distro installer distro-booter project (desktop). Current number of compatible distro.iso's = 0. Zephix gets a pass on sizing, however, they don't know where to put their .png let alone what to name it.



I won't know how to make a distro packager for anything but SmartOS, until I've figured out ROME, which depends on figuring out Hipster. But I'm working awfully hard at Bisonix un-distro'd, compared to bitd when ON distros proliferated (ask anyone who bought "Turnkey Plesk EC2" from me what OS it was, they'll probably say AWS lol) and the first thing I had to figure out turned out to be copy-pasting a line of code from the docs; I never gave a second thought to burning my distro.iso nor did I need to. That same code simply doesn't work going forward, so I'm taking it upon myself to do what Canonical did so that wannabe-distros have more choices than Ubuntu, i.e. FreeBSD and illumos.



-Eic







---- On Tue, 04 Jun 2024 02:15:44 -0700 Till Wegmüller <toasterson@gmail.com> wrote ---



Hi Eric 
 
Interesting, I did not know that much about the ISO/Disk image 
background. We would very much want support for that kind of boot. Newer 
tools such as Image builder https://github.com/illumos/image-builder do 
support the output of hybrid ISO's IIRC (please correct me if it does 
not) but slim_source needs some patches. If you can provide me with a 
patch for 
https://github.com/OpenIndiana/slim_source/blob/oi/hipster/usr/src/cmd/distro_const/utils/create_iso 
I'll gladly include it. We would also need a patch for the /usr mounting 
of the embedded solaris.zlib files since those are located on different 
places in the USB and ISO images from the live environments point of view. 
 
As for OmniOS, I am sure they are happy about a Patch to 
https://github.com/omniosorg/kayak to add support. 
 
In Summary we are very Interested in Hybrid ISO support and would love 
some patches for our shellscripts to enable that. If you or anybody who 
wants to work on that wants to submit patches but needs some guidance, 
we have a weekly CoWorking session on Sunday 17:00 CEST for OpenIndiana 
where I can help with that. Or You can also mail me, or write in the 
list or in the fediverse under #illumos. 
 
Greetings 
Till 
 
On 04.06.24 01:48, Eric J Bowman via illumos-discuss wrote: 
> UEFI with no CSM (excluding CSM "disabled" in "BIOS") sees "Solaris 
> Boot" or "FreeBSD Boot" when looking for a partition to boot; this isn't 
> a MBR, so all it can do is boot the drive. Without CSM to tell it how to 
> legacy boot a drive in 32-bit protected mode, the 16-bit real-mode boot 
> proceeds from the 8088 running MINIX whence it (likely) came, with but 
> one exception: PMBR. 
> 
> Now your installer's running in 16-bit protected mode... so when it goes 
> to write gptzfsboot... it's really zfsboot... because it doesn't thnk 
> the system speaks 32-bit UEFI, although it is similar to the language 
> used by a binary moisture evaporator, or so I'm told. 
> 
> My "computer museum" (glorified shed) contains my old Packard-Bell 386, 
> from the days when I was porting my code to protected mode, and couldn't 
> boot DOS or Windows or Netware from the "CDROM" which was really a CD 
> Player with an IDE interface. So I had to buy what's been my office 
> doorstop for 25 years, 100% functional uptime and quite the conversation 
> piece, says "NEC" on it and has a SCSI interface, only a brick due to 
> lack of adapterability. 
> 
> Little did I know until now, that at that time, I could've booted 
> BSD/Solaris from my Packard Bell's internal CD Player. 
> 
> The reason that, alone of all Ubuntu distros, Bodhi fails the same way 
> as, alone of all Solaris distros, XStreamOS-Chandra? They forgot to 
> -no-emul when they El Torito'd. When you dd distro.iso to a partition, 
> you get an empty partition and no error message, because the firmware 
> doesn't know about 3.5" floppy images, so the OS routes the write right 
> to /dev/null and dd reports a successful write, right? ;-) 
> 
> It's time to relegate this hack to the dustbin of history, if there's 
> any room left in there with all those AOL CD's it enabled, and get with 
> the UEFI program. This issue causes folks to just move on, and reinforce 
> the word-on-the-street that FreeBSD and Solaris are obsolete relics 
> which don't comply with UEFI when really, it's just the distro.iso's. 
> 
> Back to GhostBSD... In the "multiboot community" which includes Rufus, 
> Ventoy, Etcher, list goes on, compatibility lists exclude all other 
> FreeBSD/Solaris distros "because FreeBSD/Solaris" for underlying "UEFI 
> reasons" belied by GhostBSD's presence in Ventoy, which nobody will tell 
> you comes down to it's /EFI not /efi BUT there you have it. When EFI 
> came along, /EFI went through the same lowercase() as /boot, because 
> part of the hack from back when a bunch of bigwigs got high together in 
> the sierras was breaking FAT with /boot *deliberately* and now that UEFI 
> mandates vFAT compliance, it's /EFI/boot. 
> 
> The only reason GhostBSD only installs properly for me from Ventoy, is 
> that Ventoy copied the hack that Linux uses to launch their kernel in 
> PXE, which I didn't realize how worked until lately because I'm not into 
> Linux, but immediately recognize as the ol' QEMM 
> A20-kbd-interrupt-your-way-into-protected-mode hack... and Linux folks 
> are saying Solaris is obsolete? Good grief, all y'all need to quit 
> arguing, because after over a decade away from IT and 15 from Solaris, I 
> come back and find my problems result from everyone's still using 1980's 
> hacks. Stop it! :-) 
> 
> Also, OmniOS CE fails interoperability the same way as Alpine Linux, by 
> using a " " in what's effectively a DOS filename. Because mkisofs isn't 
> the only tool that won't bitch about that, thinking you're burning an 
> Audio CD. 
> 
> So there's a clear choice to be made in the Solaris and FreeBSD worlds 
> (Net and Open don't use this hack), moving forward with UEFI or sticking 
> with supporting CD Player boot, you can't have it both ways. 
> 
> -Eric 
> 
> 
> *illumos <https://illumos.topicbox.com/latest>* / illumos-discuss / see 
> discussions <https://illumos.topicbox.com/groups/discuss> + participants 
> <https://illumos.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/members> + delivery options 
> <https://illumos.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/subscription> Permalink 
> <https://illumos.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/T105ca75544ab3123-M81af7eb44fc23a3114fbbbd4> 
 
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Re: [discuss] Remove distro.iso support for IDE CD Players.

[Eric J Bowman]

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Oh. My re-pack of smartos.iso, has a final stage of renaming distro.img to distro.iso. Yes, I know why that works.



-Eric

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Re: [discuss] Remove distro.iso support for IDE CD Players.

[Eric J Bowman]

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Beggin' all y'all's pardon... Also, all my smartos-repack.iso really needs in its ESP, is iso9660.efi renamed /boot/bootx64.efi .



-Eric

(who's kbd's 'r' key needs tlc)






---- On Wed, 12 Jun 2024 22:43:01 -0700 Eric J Bowman via illumos-discuss <discuss@lists.illumos.org> wrote ---



Oh. My re-pack of smartos.iso, has a final stage of renaming distro.img to distro.iso. Yes, I know why that works.



-Eric






https://illumos.topicbox.com/latest / illumos-discuss / see https://illumos.topicbox.com/groups/discuss + https://illumos.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/members + https://illumos.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/subscription https://illumos.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/T105ca75544ab3123-Meb58d283770a7c6b1ddd6bf6

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Re: [discuss] Remove distro.iso support for IDE CD Players.

[Eric J Bowman]

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One thing that is patchable for illumos / BSD's, is Calamares...



>

In Summary we are very Interested in Hybrid ISO support and would love 

some patches for our shellscripts to enable that. If you or anybody who 

wants to work on that wants to submit patches but needs some guidance, 

we have a weekly CoWorking session on Sunday 17:00 CEST for OpenIndiana 

where I can help with that. Or You can also mail me, or write in the 

list or in the fediverse under #illumos.

>



...not Kalamares, despite being the default installer for KDE OS distros. It's even used by a handful of Ubuntus despite being the default Fedora. Its roots are Red Hat, and what's interesting about it is that RH's rules are a layer on top of UEFI's rules, strictly there for Windows interop. There are a wide variety of problems out there with a wide variety of workarounds, to get Calamares to work with a wide variety of multiboot scenarios.

To doff the Fedora from UEFI's head:

> sudo rm -f /sbin/blkid
> sudo calamares -d

All those problems start with consulting blkid. You're in a live environment, the change won't persist. Only thing in the way of using it for illumos/BSD is device naming, not the lack of blkid.

-Eric

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Re: [discuss] Remove distro.iso support for IDE CD Players.

[Eric J Bowman]

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Ubuntu's "distro packager" is also a single line of code, as follows:






"Trees of bootloader components are profided together with a sample xorriso command to use."



Spelling randomly varies by architecture. ;-) The other key to Ubuntu's proliferation has been the shim.efi/fbx.efi secure-boot process, /EFI/ubuntu can be re-named and so can everything else, but it won't boot, secure or not, unless the kernel is rebuilt to use a different name. All Ubuntu's, even Bodhi, use not only the same signed bootloader, but the same signature, which Canonical paid Microsoft for. Secure or not, you'll need a "non-generic" kernel to EFI stub-load from the firmware boot manager.



SmartOS secure-boots from optical only. There is no ESP or PXE involved, secure boot or no. The security is between your UEFI and your CDROM. I can boot smartos.iso from SDXC, directly in the slot, on a subset of hardware having said slot. I have a USB SDXC reader that says it's an optical drive, I can boot from that too, also a subset. I can boot from SD with the USB reader, or the older iMac, but the newer slots have a firmware requirement of SDXC for secure boot. For which the SD/SDXC USB reader, is a workaround. But, only if the UEFI allows USB boot.



Internal SDXC secure-boot doesn't require Microsoft Security Theatre. BYOKey.


-Eric

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Re: [discuss] Remove distro.iso support for IDE CD Players.

[Eric J Bowman]

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I won't be submitting any patches for mkisofs, as Bisonix won't be including it. Instead, I'll be porting xorriso back to the platform from whence its codebase came, and patching *that* for 64K -pad alignment, along with any other patches I deem necessary. BISxorriso SVR4 package, "coming soon."



-Eric

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Re: [discuss] Remove distro.iso support for IDE CD Players.

[Eric J Bowman]

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The smartos-latest.iso is the only illumos distro compatible with all iso9660.efi drivers out there. I hope to have hipster-repack.iso available later today; it only works with the included iso9660_x64.efi, which is the 32-bit GRUB "_x64" driver. I will also be posting smartos-repack.iso, with the latest (earlier this month) 64-bit iso9660_x64.efi included. I don't know why this is, yet. I only figured it out today. Three solid months of primary focus, figuring out my repack.iso's.



An interesting discovery, is that Bodhi and Chandra both edited the one line of code for packaging their respective distros, the same way. One calls mkisofs, the other calls xorriso, except Bodhi also edited xorriso to genisoimage. I won't get around to porting xorriso anytime soon, but it will be done...


-Eric








---- On Mon, 03 Jun 2024 16:48:09 -0700 Eric J Bowman via illumos-discuss <discuss@lists.illumos.org> wrote ---



UEFI with no CSM (excluding CSM "disabled" in "BIOS") sees "Solaris Boot" or "FreeBSD Boot" when looking for a partition to boot; this isn't a MBR, so all it can do is boot the drive. Without CSM to tell it how to legacy boot a drive in 32-bit protected mode, the 16-bit real-mode boot proceeds from the 8088 running MINIX whence it (likely) came, with but one exception: PMBR.

Now your installer's running in 16-bit protected mode... so when it goes to write gptzfsboot... it's really zfsboot... because it doesn't thnk the system speaks 32-bit UEFI, although it is similar to the language used by a binary moisture evaporator, or so I'm told.

My "computer museum" (glorified shed) contains my old Packard-Bell 386, from the days when I was porting my code to protected mode, and couldn't boot DOS or Windows or Netware from the "CDROM" which was really a CD Player with an IDE interface. So I had to buy what's been my office doorstop for 25 years, 100% functional uptime and quite the conversation piece, says "NEC" on it and has a SCSI interface, only a brick due to lack of adapterability.

Little did I know until now, that at that time, I could've booted BSD/Solaris from my Packard Bell's internal CD Player.

The reason that, alone of all Ubuntu distros, Bodhi fails the same way as, alone of all Solaris distros, XStreamOS-Chandra? They forgot to -no-emul when they El Torito'd. When you dd distro.iso to a partition, you get an empty partition and no error message, because the firmware doesn't know about 3.5" floppy images, so the OS routes the write right to /dev/null and dd reports a successful write, right? ;-)

It's time to relegate this hack to the dustbin of history, if there's any room left in there with all those AOL CD's it enabled, and get with the UEFI program. This issue causes folks to just move on, and reinforce the word-on-the-street that FreeBSD and Solaris are obsolete relics which don't comply with UEFI when really, it's just the distro.iso's.

Back to GhostBSD... In the "multiboot community" which includes Rufus, Ventoy, Etcher, list goes on, compatibility lists exclude all other FreeBSD/Solaris distros "because FreeBSD/Solaris" for underlying "UEFI reasons" belied by GhostBSD's presence in Ventoy, which nobody will tell you comes down to it's /EFI not /efi BUT there you have it. When EFI came along, /EFI went through the same lowercase() as /boot, because part of the hack from back when a bunch of bigwigs got high together in the sierras was breaking FAT with /boot *deliberately* and now that UEFI mandates vFAT compliance, it's /EFI/boot.

The only reason GhostBSD only installs properly for me from Ventoy, is that Ventoy copied the hack that Linux uses to launch their kernel in PXE, which I didn't realize how worked until lately because I'm not into Linux, but immediately recognize as the ol' QEMM A20-kbd-interrupt-your-way-into-protected-mode hack... and Linux folks are saying Solaris is obsolete? Good grief, all y'all need to quit arguing, because after over a decade away from IT and 15 from Solaris, I come back and find my problems result from everyone's still using 1980's hacks. Stop it! :-)

Also, OmniOS CE fails interoperability the same way as Alpine Linux, by using a " " in what's effectively a DOS filename. Because mkisofs isn't the only tool that won't bitch about that, thinking you're burning an Audio CD.

So there's a clear choice to be made in the Solaris and FreeBSD worlds (Net and Open don't use this hack), moving forward with UEFI or sticking with supporting CD Player boot, you can't have it both ways.

-Eric



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