ZFS behavior when device disappears

[Jason J. W. Williams]

Hi Pawel,

I totally understand the time commitment. I know several of the
primary ZFS committers on OpenSolaris, and realize that it's easier
for them because they're paid by Sun to work on it. Thank you very
much for your effort on making it work inside of FreeBSD. It's giving
all of us that made the jump to OpenSolaris a life raft.

To be honest the two things that are critical to our company on
OpenSolaris are ZFS and Zones.

-J

On Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 8:23 AM, Pawel Jakub Dawidek <pjd at freebsd.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 07:24:53AM -0600, Jason J. W. Williams wrote:
>> Hi Pawel,
>>
>> Thank you very much for the response! Please forgive some of my
>> questions, as I'm a bit unfamiliar with the FreeBSD port.
>>
>> What is the nature of the port? Is it something where each new version
>> of ZFS is a from-scratch effort to some degree? Or is it a point where
>> new ZFS versions are a matter of just making the newer features
>> operational?
>
> Definitely the latter, but there some problems:
>
> - Some changes in OpenSolaris ZFS are very hard to port in short time,
>  and when it takes a lot of time, new versions arrive and it is nice to
>  get them too, etc. which makes whole process to take long time.
>
>  Good example here is moving some functionality to Python, where we
>  have to decided what to do about that without importing Python to the
>  base system.
>
> - OpenSolaris ZFS is experimental and I don't think Solaris version is
>  published anywhere. This means it needs extensive testing on our side,
>  which of course takes time.
>
> - OpenSolaris changes are often not easy to understand. They have
>  different commit rules than we have. Commit logs are not very helpful
>  and multiple fixes are committed in one go, which makes it hard to
>  separate individual changes if we just need a fix and not intrusive
>  change that came along.
>
> I'm doing my best, but my time is limited. I see more and more people
> are interested in helping with ZFS, which is a very good sign I was
> waiting for for a long time:)
>
> It is of course still wonderful that we can use ZFS. All my servers and
> my laptop are running exclusively on ZFS at this point:)
>
> --
> Pawel Jakub Dawidek                       http://www.wheelsystems.com
> pjd at FreeBSD.org                           http://www.FreeBSD.org
> FreeBSD committer                         Am I Evil? Yes, I Am!
>