ZFS docs / info

[Andrew Hill]

Not sure if this is the right list for this (apologies if not) but here
goes...

Over the last week I've spent a lot of time getting to know ZFS; starting
with basically no knowledge of how the bits and pieces are structured, nor
how to use it, and (with a lot of late nights) getting to the point where I
feel comfortable using it for a ~2TB raidz server.

I've been using FreeBSD for about 8 years, so I'm comfortable using the
system, my learning curve was purely with zfs. So at the suggestion of a
friend I made a bunch of notes and wrote an intro to zfs as I now see it,
and made some specific notes on things that I didn't find obvious from the
documentation (at least the docs I found... which were the ZFS Tuning Guide
on wiki.freebsd.org, the sun ZFS administrator's guide, zfs/zpool man pages
and a bunch of blogs). Mostly the structure of the differnet elements of ZFS
(zpools, file systems, vdevs, zvols) and how they interact, but also a few
limitations of how those can be configured.

I figure what I've written may be (hopefully) useful to others with UNIX
experience but brand new to ZFS, or, better still, if someone is writing a
wiki or documentation for ZFS on bsd, i'm happy for any of what i've written
to be used for that kind of thing.

post 1 - basic intro, overview of the structure of zfs (zpools, zfs, vdevs,
zvols and how they all interact)
http://blog.thefrog.net/2008/04/zfs-on-freebsd.html

post 2 - some notable limitations and features i didn't really get from my
reading of the docs (and a bug that i've yet to reproduce in a debug kernel)
http://blog.thefrog.net/2008/04/more-zfs-on-freebsd.html

i'm providing links because there's a rather large amount of text, which
will no doubt have the odd mistake to fix as they're pointed out to me

anyway, hope it helps someone