ZFS boot

[Nate Eldredge]

On Sat, 11 Oct 2008, Freddie Cash wrote:

> On 10/11/08, Matthew Dillon <dillon at apollo.backplane.com> wrote:
>>     With regards to the traditional BSD partitioning scheme, having a
>>     separate /usr, /home, /tmp, etc... there's no reason to do that stuff
>>     any more with ZFS (or HAMMER).
>
> As separate partitions, no.  As separate filesystems, definitely.
>
> While HAMMER PFSes may not support these things yet, ZFS allows you to
> tailor each filesystem to its purpose.  For example, you can enable
> compression on /usr/ports, but have a separate /usr/ports/distfilles
> and /usr/ports/work that aren't compressed.  Or /usr/src compressed
> and /usr/obj not.  Have a small record (block) size for /usr/src, but
> a larger one for /home.  Give each user a separate filesystem for
> their /home/<username>, with separate snapshot policies, quotas, and
> reservations (initial filesystem size).

All this about ZFS sounds great, and I'd like to try it out, but some of 
the bugs, etc, listed at http://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFSKnownProblems are 
rather alarming.  Even on a personal machine, I don't want these features 
at the cost of an unstable system.  Is that list still current?

FWIW, my system is amd64 with 1 G of memory, which the page implies is 
insufficient.  Is it really?

-- 

Nate Eldredge
neldredge at math.ucsd.edu