Hi Thomas,
scdbackup wrote:I need real iron for the tests with DVD burners.
Of course i should try to install a newer FreeBSD ... but i am an awful
sysadmin and first i'd need to understand or replace the master GRUB of
the disk.
I'm not sure if you are currently using grub-legacy or grub2, but may be you don't need to change boot loader at all; the simplest method to boot mutiple OSes is install each OS on a dedicated partition, and each OS own loader installed on the same partition. You can then use "chainloading" from your actual grub because that method is OS agnostic, and the needed config is limited to point the right disk/partition.
You can use the same method with grub or grub2 (although the syntax is a little different, specifically the partition numbering start from 0 in grub legacy and start from 1 in grub2).
A different method often used is to load the kernel directly, that imply that grub must have some knowledge of the filesystem hosting the kernel, and grub2 does a rather good job because can provide support for USF or ZFS (of interest for FreeBSD), but that support is optional and some Linux distribution doesn't install the related modules by default in /boot/grub (however they are generally available in /usr/share/grub or something like that).
FreeBSD installer doesn't provide grub by default, but GhostBSD offer it as an option, our grub2 of course install the support for UFS, ZFS and Linux filesystems.
For FreeBSD specifically, one can load the kernel, or the "loader" (/boot/loader), and eventually I suggest to load the loader: the reason is that the freebsd docs often refers to changes/additions in loader.conf and that settings are evaluated from BTX loader, bur are skipped if you load the kernel directly; Of course those settings could be applied directly from grub, but is not simple, there is a different syntax and this is also not well documented.
Don't know about OpenSolaris, but the chainloading method should work.
Would Virtualbox 4.3.18 on a Linux kernel be able to forward a real
DVD burner to a FreeBSD guest so that it appears as /dev/cd0 with full
SCSI passthrough via libcam ?
I.e. not only as emulated DVD-ROM but as usable burner for cdrecord,
growisofs, or in my case libburn.
Yes, as far as I know pass-trough is available for virtualized disks and optical drives,
provided you have installed the "Extension Pack", that is not supported in virtualbox for freebsd, but should be supported on virtualbox for linux.
http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualb ... ox-extpack