I have also been trying to figure out the best strategy regarding ZFS boot... I currently have a single disk UFS boot and RAID-Z for data. I plan on getting a mirror for boot, but I still don't understand what my options are regarding:
- Should I set up one zfs slice for the entire drive and mimic live update functionality with writable clones? Or use multiple slices, each with a ZFS boot environment? - Is it reasonable to expect that this scheme will eventually be the way ZFS boot and Live Upgrade will work in "official" release so I don't have to reinstall entire system? - Are there any other drawbacks to going with ZFS boot at this time? As a side note, and the reason I am so thankful to people who created ZFS, I will tell a brief story... I used to have a Windows XP machine with a motherboard with onboard Sil3112A SATA chipset, and Seagate 200GB 7200.7drive that contained much data. I had spent months over time ripping a few hundred CDs that my wife and I had in our collection, and they were stored in .APE format (compressed, lossless, and checksummed). I had at the same time made a rip in mp3 format for iPod/iTunes, so I rarely had reason to access lossless files - they were there for long term backup and convenience. Occasionally I would realize that one of them refused to decompress (failed checksum), but I figured it is a bug somewhere and re-ripped it and hoped it wouldn't happen again. Then I realized that too many had this problem, and started to systematically decompress them, only to find out that around 25-30% of the files were damaged - at least hundred hours of ripping and cataloguing down the drain. While researching this issue, I found out that there were incompatibilities between controller and the drive, and that people on Linux had to hack the drivers to get around this problem (google Mod15Write). Windows drivers were also fixed at some point - don't know when - and if it weren't for large, checksummed files that disk was full of, I could have gone on for years without realizing that data is getting corrupted. (it was only a few bits at a time - a tiny % of total number of bits, but when you have 500MB files...). This motherboard is still alive and is currently running OpenSolaris (not using on-board SATA controller), and the drive is happily chugging along on a ICH7-based motherboard in OSX. Moral of the story being that even very mainstream and well-regarded hardware that seems a perfectly sensible purchase at the time (The very popular ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe motherboard with Seagate SATA drives of the same period) can turn out to be a disaster, and you won't know until it is too late. Not to sound too sappy, but right now with a 1yr old, I have too many precious digital photos and videos and losing them is not an option. I use a combination of DVD and online backups, but none of it is any good if data is saliently rotting at the source. Thank you, ZFS team. On 6/4/07, Douglas Atique <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hi, I have been trying to setup a boot ZFS filesystem since b63 and found out about bug 6553537 that was preventing boot from ZFS filesystems starting from b63. First question is whether b65 has solved the problem as was planned on the bug page. Second question is: as I cannot boot successfully from a ZFS filesystem after following the ZFS Boot Manual Setup instructions (http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/boot/zfsboot-manual/) due to a panic down the call chain of vfs_mountroot, what else (other than the bug, that is) could be wrong? -- Douglas
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