Hi Robert, Thanks for your response.
I've pulled down the latest image from: http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/daily-builds/daily/arch-latest/kfreebsd-amd64/iso-cd/ to test today. The buildd at this time showed kfreebsd-amd64 as version (9). Here are my notes: ZFS partitions were detected as ext4. I was unable to destroy a pool from the menu. I needed to switch to a shell and "zpool destroy" to get rid of any existing configuration. Using multi disk pools looks to work perfect. Naming pools worked like magic. I especially like the ability to create pools without partitions! It seems that the workflow only permits you to create a pool for creating logical volumes rather than using the pool directly. In the wheezy installer I tested last weekend, exactly the opposite is true, in that you create a pool to be used directly, albeit in a partition. Upon creating a zfs volume on a zpool, I received an error that the creation of partition #1 has failed. Though, checking the console I can see system, system/slash and system/slashs1. Inspection of the system/slash zfs volume show that it has type "volume". I think that the default should be filesystem, or at least give the user the opportunity to choose the type. The error I received may have been due to attempting to create the zfs fileystem when no such formatting needed to be done. I was able to move on with the rest of the installation. I would also like the ability to make use of the zpool directly as my root filesystem. In my opinion, making "volumes" is a useful bit for certain things like iscsi and such where it is required, but I think flexibility for local storage goes out the window when its done this way and using type "filesystem" (zfs default) is preferred since you don't have to chew off a chunk of storage capacity up front. Is this because of a d-i limitation of some kind? I know I want to have and eat my cake. Installation completed without further errors. Reboot failed with checksum invalid and bailed out to a grub rescue prompt. I think this is great work and headed in the right direction. Please let me know how I can help. Zach On Sun, Jul 31, 2011 at 1:16 PM, Robert Millan <r...@debian.org> wrote: > Hi Zach > > 2011/7/31 Zach JL <xaque...@gmail.com>: > > I think that the user should be given a chance to enter a name for the > zpool > > during installation in the same way that when installing Linux, the user > has > > a chance to enter the name of a Volume Group for LVM root. > > I think you'll be interested in: > > partman-zfs (8) unstable; urgency=low > > * Redesign ZFS pool management (mostly based on partman-lvm). New > features include: > - Support for ZFS pools with multiple physical devices. > - Support for multiple filesystems within a ZFS pool. > - Support for legacy filesystems using ZFS volumes (ZVOL). > - Arbitrary names for ZFS pools, filesystems and ZVOLs. > > -- Robert Millan <r...@debian.org> Sun, 31 Jul 2011 21:51:47 +0200 > > which has just been uploaded to unstable. > > Please test! > > > The second bit I would like to add, is that it shouldn't be mandatory to > use > > partitions at all when using ZFS from the installer. ZFS is perfectly > > capable of using disks without any partitions on them at all, and from > > my understanding of using ZFS in this way, it will actually improve > > performance because you are giving the filesystem access to write cache > on > > the disk. See this link for more about that: > > > http://www.solarisinternals.com/wiki/index.php/ZFS_Best_Practices_Guide#Storage_Pools > > I know about the write cache issue, but I'm not sure how can this fit > into partman's workflow. AFAIK partman always wants a partition > label. This might require changes to other parts of D-I. > > -- > Robert Millan > -- Zach
