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October 7, 2009

Access to Solaris from Linux

Contents

  1. Installation Stuff
  2. Kernel Configuration
  3. Access the Solaris filesystems
  4. LILO Configuration

Installation Stuff

When installing Solaris 10 or OpenSolaris together with Linux the easiest and painleast way is to create a primary partition under Linux (with fdisk or cfdisk) and set the partition ID to bf (Solaris):

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1        1034     8305573+  a5  FreeBSD
/dev/sda2            1035        2251     9775552+  bf  Solaris
/dev/sda3   *        2252        2283      257040   83  Linux
/dev/sda4            2284       19457   137950155    5  Extended
/dev/sda5            2284        5445    25398733+  8e  Linux LVM
/dev/sda6            5446        5713     2152678+  82  Linux swap
/dev/sda7            5714       19457   110398648+  8e  Linux LVM

The installer of Solaris finds the partition of type bf and you can create your slices within this partiton. While installing make sure that you use ufs as filesystem since the Linux kernel lacks support for zfs. Furthermore be sure that the bootloader is not to be installed in the MBR but in the Solaris partition's boot block.

When I installed Solaris on my Laptop I let the Solaris installer automatically slice my disk. This works fine for the installation. But later I ran into problems. The reason is that /var is way to small. You will notice this when you try to install additional software. It will soon fail. Since we didn't use Solaris Disk Suite (kind of LVM) resizing /var is not an option. The solution I found is to create a symbolic link:

Solaris# mkdir /export/home/var
Solaris:/var# cd /var
Solaris:/var# tar cBf - sadm | ( cd /export/home/var && tar xvpBf - )
Solaris:/var# rm -rf sadm
Solaris:/var# ln -s /export/home/var/sadm sadm

/var/sadm is the location where Solaris stores all package related information.

2. Kernel Configuration

In order to be able to see our Solaris slices under Linux we need to configure our Linux kernel with Solaris (x86) partition table support:

root@tux# make menuconfig

And obviously we also need support for Solaris' filesystem type ufs.

As we see write support is still marked as DANGEROUS.

A note on the kernel version: If you use SATA disk controllers you have to use a recent kernel (2.6.30 or higher). Otherwise you won't be able to access slices higher than /dev/sda15! This is a stupid restriction of older Linux kernels - coming from the days where the Linux SCSI driver was designed for real SCSI targets. In our example we need to go up to /dev/sda18. If we would use an older kernel Solaris' /usr and /export/home filesystems could not be accessed from Linux!

Access the Solaris filesystem

First we should check our /etc/vfstab under Solaris, e.g. for the above example it might look as shown below:

Solaris# cat /etc/vfstab
#device            device              mount              FS      fsck    mount   mount
#to mount          to fsck             point              type    pass    at boot options
#
fd                 -                   /dev/fd            fd      -       no      -
/proc              -                   /proc              proc    -       no      -
/dev/dsk/c1t0d0s3  -                   -                  swap    -       no      -
/dev/dsk/c1t0d0s0  /dev/rdsk/c1t0d0s0  /                  ufs     1       no      -
/dev/dsk/c1t0d0s6  /dev/rdsk/c1t0d0s6  /usr               ufs     1       no      -
/dev/dsk/c1t0d0s1  /dev/rdsk/c1t0d0s1  /var               ufs     1       no      -
/dev/dsk/c1t0d0s7  /dev/rdsk/c1t0d0s7  /export/home       ufs     2       yes     -
/devices           -                   /devices           devfs   -       no      -
sharefs            -                   /etc/dfs/sharetab  sharefs -       no      -
ctfs               -                   /system/contract   ctfs    -       no      -
objfs              -                   /system/object     objfs   -       no      -
swap               -                   /tmp               tmpfs   -       yes     -

Back at Linux we check the kernel messages for the Solaris disklabel:

 root@tux# dmesg | grep solaris
 sda2: <solaris: [s0] sda13 [s1] sda14 [s2] sda15 [s3] sda16 [s6] sda17 [s7] sda18 [s8] sda19 >

If we compare this output with the /etc/vfstab of our Solaris installation, we can easily see what linux partiton name matches a Solaris Slice name:

This is all we need to know to add the Solaris filesystems to our /etc/fstab under Linux:

# Solaris
/dev/sda13     /solaris              ufs     ro,ufstype=sun      1  0
/dev/sda14     /solaris/var          ufs     ro,ufstype=sun      1  0
/dev/sda17     /solaris/usr          ufs     ro,ufstype=sun      1  0
/dev/sda18     /solaris/export/home  ufs     ro,ufstype=sun      1  0

As mentioned before, write support is still marked as dangerous - to be on the safe side we add the read-only (ro) option.

LILO Configuration

Solaris uses Grub as bootmanager. You might want to try to integrate the Solaris partition in your Linux' Grub confguration. However, since I use LILO as boot loader I could not test such a setup.

Assuming we use LILO as our primary boot manager we add a section like

#
# Solaris 10
#
other = /dev/sda2
  label = Solaris

to /etc/lilo.conf and rerun lilo. The above entry creates a line 'Solaris' in LILO's boot menu, that in fact starts Grub as a second boot loader.

To get this to work make sure that under Solaris you don't use the master boot record for installing Grub.