Boot from ZFS

[Duncan Young]

Be carefull,  I've just had a 6 disk raidz array die.  Complete failure which 
required restore from backup (the controler card which had access to 4 of the 
disks, lost one disk, then a second (at which point the machine paniced, Upon 
reboot the raidz array was useless (Metadata corrupted)).  I'm also getting 
reasonably frequent machine lockups (panics) in the zfs code.  I'm going to 
start collecting crash dumps see if anyone can help in the next week or two.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, that you can still lose everything on an 
entire pool, so backups are still essential, an a couple of smaller pools is 
probably preferable to one big pool (restore time is less).  zfs is not %100 
(yet?).  The lack of any type of fsck still causes me concern.

Duncan

PS I do think zfs is great, but it's not perfect.  If I can boot directly off 
zfs, I would make sure I had an offline replication of the boot disk, in case 
of failure.

On Sat, 12 Jul 2008 04:24:30 am Ollivier Robert wrote:
> According to Steve Bertrand:
> > "In the latest code, it's possible to boot directly from ZFS, no longer
> > requiring a small non-ZFS boot partition. "No you can use only ZFS and
> > just enjoy it," he stated."
> >
> > ...if not, where can I find information on the best procedure to do so?
>
> This code is not yet committed to CURRENT, it is currently in a P4 branch.
> Doug Rabson is also doing some work on it according to p4 changes.