zfs_20070303.patch on current

[Dag-Erling Smørgrav]

Barry Pederson <bp at barryp.org> writes:
> Is there any hope for someday optionally using ZFS as a root filesystem?

For that to be possible, both /boot/boot2 and /boot/loader need to
understand ZFS well enough to read files from it.  There isn't much
room to spare in /boot/boot2, so we'd have to have a separate version
for ZFS and teach 'disklabel -B' how to pick the right one.

> I was sort of imagining a setup where /boot resided in a UFS
> filesystem so it could hold the kernel/modules/regular booting info
> and -
> /boot/loader.conf would specify 'zfs_load="YES"' along with another
> directive to tell which zfs filesystem to use as root.

Unlike Linux, where this is a common configuration, FreeBSD can't
mount a root filesystem underneath an already mounted /boot
filesystem.  Nor do we have anything resembling Linux's pivot_root
which would allow us to mount the root filesystem on top of /boot and
then switch them around.

DES
-- 
Dag-Erling Smørgrav - des at des.no