On 2013-03-19 20:38, Cindy Swearingen wrote:
Hi Andrew,
Your original syntax was incorrect.
A p* device is a larger container for the d* device or s* devices.
In the case of a cache device, you need to specify a d* or s* device.
That you can add p* devices to a pool is a bug.
I disagree; at least, I've always thought differently:
the "d" device is the whole disk denomination, with a
unique number for a particular controller link ("c+t").
The disk has some partitioning table, MBR or GPT/EFI.
In these tables, partition "p0" stands for the table
itself (i.e. to manage partitioning), and the rest kind
of "depends". In case of MBR tables, one partition may
be named as having a Solaris (or Solaris2) type, and
there it holds a SMI table of Solaris slices, and these
slices can hold legacy filesystems or components of ZFS
pools. In case of GPT, the GPT-partitions can be used
directly by ZFS. However, they are also denominated as
"slices" in ZFS and format utility.
I believe, Solaris-based OSes accessing a "p"-named
partition and an "s"-named slice of the same number
on a GPT disk should lead to the same range of bytes
on disk, but I am not really certain about this.
Also, if a "whole disk" is given to ZFS (and for OSes
other that the latest Solaris 11 this means non-rpool
disks), then ZFS labels the disk as GPT and defines a
partition for itself plus a small trailing partition
(likely to level out discrepancies with replacement
disks that might happen to be a few sectors too small).
In this case ZFS reports that it uses "cXtYdZ" as a
pool component, since it considers itself in charge
of the partitioning table and its inner contents, and
doesn't intend to share the disk with other usages
(dual-booting and other OSes' partitions, or SLOG and
L2ARC parts, etc). This also "allows" ZFS to influence
hardware-related choices, like caching and throttling,
and likely auto-expansion with the changed LUN sizes
by fixing up the partition table along the way, since
it assumes being 100% in charge of the disk.
I don't think there is a "crime" in trying to use the
partitions (of either kind) as ZFS leaf vdevs, even the
zpool(1M) manpage states that:
... The following virtual devices are supported:
disk
A block device, typically located under /dev/dsk.
ZFS can use individual slices or partitions,
though the recommended mode of operation is to use
whole disks. ...
This is orthogonal to the fact that there can only be
one Solaris slice table, inside one partition, on MBR.
AFAIK this is irrelevant on GPT/EFI - no SMI slices there.
On my old home NAS with OpenSolaris I certainly did have
MBR partitions on the rpool intended initially for some
dual-booted OSes, but repurposed as L2ARC and ZIL devices
for the storage pool on other disks, when I played with
that technology. Didn't gain much with a single spindle ;)
HTH,
//Jim Klimov
_______________________________________________
zfs-discuss mailing list
zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org
http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
