Booting from ZFS raidz

[krad]

2010/1/6 Anselm Strauss <amsibamsi at gmail.com>

> Hi,
>
> I'm experimenting with a ZFS only system and booting from it in VirtualBox.
> Thanks to various mails and forum posts from the net I have a working
> scenario with booting from a ZFS mirror. However, I can't get the thing to
> work with raidz with the exactly same setup, except that the pool is now
> raidz instead of mirror and there is one more disk. I feel sure I have all
> the stuff with partitioning, boot loader installation, etc. right. I tested
> this with version 8.0-RELEASE on 64bit.
>
> Now, before I go into detailed explaining, is raidz really supported? I
> always get the following error after it says "FreeBSD/i386 bootstrap loader,
> Revision 1.1":
>
> ZFS: i/o error - all block copies unavailable
> ZFS: can't read MOS object directory
> (repeats a lot)
> Can't find root filesystem - giving up
> can't load 'kernel'
>
> I think the "MOS" message comes from zfs_mount_root() in
> /usr/src/sys/boot/zfs/zfsimpl.c. I asume that is the point when /boot/loader
> has been loaded and now wants to load the kernel into memory. After that
> error I'm in the loader prompt. When I try to load any file I always get the
> same error as above.
>
> Anyone any ideas?
>
> Thanks,
> Anselm_______________________________________________
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Opensolaris doesnt support booting off raidz yet so id be surprised if you
managed to, as i doubt all the relevent code is in the loader, and robust
enough yet. I have seen a few hacks mentioned in places that might get it to
work, bit these are unsupported and might flake out at any time.

Also why do you need a raidz for the os? It implys you might be mixing data
on the pool as well. This isnt best practice, and you are best off having a
separate pool for os and data. If you have 3+ drives, gpt it into 3 or 4
chunks dependent on whether you want swap on a zvol. Have and x way mirror
for the os and then the last and biggest gpt slice use for your raidz data.
Better still have the os and data on separate spindles