I just perused through the ZFS Best Practices wiki entry on solarisinternals.com and it says that for ZFS boot, the pool is restricted to one disk and mirror pools. Is this still applicable to build 62 and the mentioned "new code"? The availability of the "zpool set bootfs" command suggests that you might be able to tell ZFS to give that specific filesystem in a pool a special treatment, as such not striping the data going into that filesystem. How far off am I with my guess? Will I be able to create a single multi disk pool and be able to boot off it? Thanks. This message posted from opensolaris.org
Mario Goebbels wrote:> I just perused through the ZFS Best Practices wiki entry on > solarisinternals.com and it says that for ZFS boot, the pool > is restricted to one disk and mirror pools. Is this still > applicable to build 62 and the mentioned "new code"?I''m not sure what you mean by "one disk." Today, it works with mirrors and your BIOS must be able to see all of the drives in a root pool. Fortunately these requirements can be satisfied by a vast majority of the boxes out there.> The availability of the "zpool set bootfs" command suggests > that you might be able to tell ZFS to give that specific filesystem > in a pool a special treatment, as such not striping the data > going into that filesystem. How far off am I with my guess?Special treatment, yes. But striping is not a file system attribute, it is a pool attribute. What I envision happening is that you may have several different root file systems (all in one pool) over time -- especially if you use LiveUpgrade. You may also have a different policy for that file system. For example, in a single disk laptop, I set the policy of copies=1 for the OS because it is read-mostly and if a file rots, I can reload it from media. OTOH for my home directory''s file system I set copies=2 because I like my data and want more protection for those things that are not on a DVD somewhere.> Will I be able to create a single multi disk pool and be able to > boot off it?Yes. -- richard
With "one disk" I basically mean pools consisting of a single toplevel vdev. The current documentation poses this restriction, either a single disk or a mirror. The thing I have in mind is the ability to create a single pool of all disks in a system as top level devices, basically a JBOD or even RAIDZ, while also being able to boot from it. The mentioned restriction, if it still applies, would require me to create two pools, one for the bootfs, the other for the data. This would imply that I''d have to divide one of the disks to be used into two slices, one used for the bootfs, the other for the data pool, to minimize the potentially unused diskspace wasted on the bootfs. Slicing a disk isn''t that tragic, but I guess to be avoided, as it is preferred to use whole disks. Thus why I''m trying to find out about this and was wondering what''s planned in future for ZFS boot. Regards. -mg This message posted from opensolaris.org
Mario Goebbels wrote:> With "one disk" I basically mean pools consisting of a single toplevel vdev. The current documentation poses this restriction, either a single disk or a mirror. > >Yes, it is still the case that the roopool has to be either a single vdev pool or a mirror. Currently, we have no plan to support additional kind of root pool yet. Lin
Mario Goebbels wrote:>With "one disk" I basically mean pools consisting of a single toplevel vdev. The current documentation poses this restriction, either a single disk or a mirror. > >The thing I have in mind is the ability to create a single pool of all disks in a system as top level devices, basically a JBOD or even RAIDZ, while also being able to boot from it. The mentioned restriction, if it still applies, would require me to create two pools, one for the bootfs, the other for the data. This would imply that I''d have to divide one of the disks to be used into two slices, one used for the bootfs, the other for the data pool, to minimize the potentially unused diskspace wasted on the bootfs. >For now, that''s exactly what you need to do. I know it''s not optimal. We have plans to support booting from configurations other than simple mirrors, but that won''t be supported in the first release. lori