zfs discuss - May 2008 - Notification of Important Improvements to ZFS

Would it be possible for future significant ZFS-related improvements to Nevada
be flagged up on the "heads up" page at
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/on/flag-days/all/ and also on the
announce forum/list, along with a note of which build of Nevada they were
integrated to? I''m thinking of the ZFS write-throttling announcement
which was made on a blog with no mention of which build it appeared in, and also
of the install and jumpstart support for ZFS root pools which was integrated
without a public mention that I saw.

I think it would be useful to announce these two improvements on the announce
list/forum now as well, since they are probably of interest to many users.

Keep up the great work ZFS team!

Cheers

Andrew.
 
 
This message posted from opensolaris.org

andrew> Would it be possible for future significant ZFS-related
andrew> improvements to Nevada be flagged up on the "heads up" page
andrew> at http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/on/flag-days/all/
andrew> and also on the announce forum/list, along with a note of
andrew> which build of Nevada they were integrated to?

The announce/forum list is generally used for higher-level matters
than updates for a specific subsystem.  The heads-up/flag-day page
is probably a better bet, and in fact if you check out the entries
for build 88, you will see one for ZFS Boot in particular along with
some other ZFS related notes in other builds.  However if you find
that your definition of "significant" doesn''t seem to match
up with
that used by project teams deciding whether something is worthy of
a heads-up message or not, you might want to talk to the ZFS team
about doing something more focused on the ZFS community pages.

-- John

http://blogs.sun.com/jbeck

To me, it seems obvious that there are likely to be many people waiting for ZFS
root support in the installer.

I''ve added the following text to a page on genunix about the current
state of play with ZFS root. Please feel free to use all, any or indeed none of
it on http://opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/boot/ :

Support for installing Solaris into a ZFS root was integrated into build 90 of
Nevada. To do this, you need to use either the text mode installer, or
JumpStart. Since both the Solaris installer and JumpStart are closed source, you
can only get your hands on them when the binaries are released by Sun. For most
people this means the fortnightly DVD and CD images. Based on past release
dates, build 90 of Nevada should be available on DVD and CD at around 9th June
2008.

OpenSolaris version 2008.05, which is a different operating system than Solaris
Nevada, based on the same common code base
''''does'''' have support for installing to a
root ZFS filesystem. However, because it is based on build 86 of Nevada it does
not contain key bug fixes which prevent the system from locking up under certain
circumstances. If you need a solid, reliable system with a ZFS root, it would be
best to wait for the Nevada build 90 DVD/CD images to be released.

Cheers

Andrew.
 
 
This message posted from opensolaris.org

Apologies for the misinformation. OpenSolaris 2008.05 does *not* put swap on
ZFS, so is *not* susceptible to the bugs that cause lock-ups under certain
situations where the swap is on ZFS.

Cheers

Andrew.
 
 
This message posted from opensolaris.org

On Sun, 18 May 2008, andrew wrote:
> Apologies for the misinformation. OpenSolaris 2008.05 does *not* put swap
> on ZFS, so is *not* susceptible to the bugs that cause lock-ups under
> certain situations where the swap is on ZFS.
I was just looking into the feasibility of ZFS swap/dump under OpenSolaris
2008.05. Could you possibly provide more detail about these bugs? Are the
erroneous situations common, or rare?


-- 
Paul B. Henson  |  (909) 979-6361  |  http://www.csupomona.edu/~henson/
Operating Systems and Network Analyst  |  henson at csupomona.edu
California State Polytechnic University  |  Pomona CA 91768

Your question has already been answered on another thread:

5008936 ZFS and/or zvol should support dumps
5070124 dumpadm -d /dev/... does not enforce block
device requirement for savecore
6633197 zvol should not permit newfs or createpool while
it''s in use by swap or dump

You can look these bugs up at bugs.opensolaris.org for more info.

Cheers

Andrew.
 
 
This message posted from opensolaris.org