Four unixes on one disk

Note: The next post in the Office series needs another week, I don't have access to the right VM at this time.

I have mentioned the NEO layout before and since I provided a file for it for FreeBSD, after being told that the BSDs weren't covered at all, I wanted to at least have a look into it. Since I already ran into problems with that layout in virtual machines I wanted to do this on real hardware.

The result is a spare disk (120GB) that runs FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD and OpenSolaris. The setup was a lot more straightforward thanks to slices/disklabels in all four systems. Linux, without something like EFI, would have made this a lot more complicated with many logical partitions or using LVM, etc.

After getting all the ISOs, burning them and plugging in the old disk I started with FreeBSD, simply because I'm most familiar with it. During the partitioning phase I split the disk up into four primary partitions (i.e slices) of equal size and used the first one for the individual FreeBSD partitions. To make a long story short, I chose a minimal configuration in all but FreeBSD (because it has the auto key) where a is everything and b is swap and that's it.

At first it seemed like I'd stick with the FreeBSD bootloader but OpenSolaris—while I declined all MBR et al offers during the other installs—set itself active without my approval (or I missed that option) and what comes up? GRUB! Coming from Gentoo I'd used it often enough that I'd rather stick with GRUB than ones I really didn't know at all and menu.lst already contained hints about the other partitions which were easy enough to amend to boot all four successfully:

# Unknown partition of type 165 found on /dev/rdsk/c0d0p0 partition: 1
# It maps to the GRUB device: (hd0,0) .
title FreeBSD
root (hd0,0,a)
kernel /boot/loader 

# Unknown partition of type 166 found on /dev/rdsk/c0d0p0 partition: 2
# It maps to the GRUB device: (hd0,1) .
title OpenBSD
root (hd0,1)
chainloader +1 

# Unknown partition of type 165 found on /dev/rdsk/c0d0p0 partition: 4
# It maps to the GRUB device: (hd0,3) .
title NetBSD
root (hd0,3)
chainloader +1

The only install that was a bit problematic was NetBSD which refused to boot the CD and later the install from disk until I disabled IOAPIC in the BIOS (after complaining about AHCI and me trying ten other things first, which is also the reason it was installed last here). Also it set the Solaris for some reason inactive so I had to boot with another CD to reenable that.

In conclusion, all four work nicely and the NEO layout on them is already working pretty well in most cases with the Linux files.