ZFS for a desktop computer

[Peter Schuller]

> There are patches available to allow this but frankly I don't see the 
> appeal. I think it makes much more sense to have / (including /boot) be a 
> regular UFS2 filesystem on a small partition. If something goes wrong you 
> can boot from a CD or single-user and not have to worry about getting your 
> ZFS pools back online before you can even start troubleshooting the system. 

FWIW let me just put the vote in there that to me, personally, there
is a lot of appeal. For recovery, I don't find minimalistic /:s or
fixit CD:s very useful anyway (in fact I don't think I have ever fixed
a system that way; if there is some trouble that prevents booting, I
tend to end up booting a separate fully installed system from another
drive or similar to have full flexibility).

If you're using ZFS because you want to avoid certain failure
conditions (such as "oh, there was a bad block during reconstruction
and my mirror got blown away even though it was a 4-way mirror"), it
is nice to have that applied to your *entire* system instead of having
a small root partition or boot partition that is somehow
exempted. Especially since these are the ones you really need to boot
the system.

I appreciate that supporting direct booting off of ZFS is not easy to
implement, and this is not any kind of complaint. I just want to
respond to the claim that there is no appeal to having it supported. I
doubt I am alone in thinking it would be great to boot natively off
ZFS, even if not every one under the sun agrees :)

--
/ Peter Schuller

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