ZFS as / filesystem on 7.0 ?

[Barry Pederson]

Forrest Aldrich wrote:
> I recently updated my existing 6.x systems to 7.0.  Excited to see ZFS 
> support, after looking through the current documentation, it doesn't 
> appear we can use ZFS as the / filesystem, or am I mistaken (or is that 
> even advisable).   The sysinstall doesn't seem to provide you with the 
> option for ZFS on the newly created partitions.  So I could have / as 
> UFS2 and /usr (et al) as ZFS.
> 
> Could someone clarify?  Perhaps I missed something in the documentation.
> 
> 
> Thanks.

You need to have /boot on a UFS partition, and then in /boot/loader.conf 
you can have something like

    zfs_load="YES"
    vfs.root.mountfrom="zfs:tank/root"

so that the root filesystem is in ZFS.  I doubt sysinstall supports any 
of that, you'll have to do it manually.  There's a wiki page describing 
some of this.

	http://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFSOnRoot

I've had good luck putting /boot on a CompactFlash device, and 
dedicating the entire regular harddisk(s) to ZFS (no slices or 
partitions).

glabeling the disks before putting them into a ZFS pool seems to be a 
good idea too - that way they have a fixed name you can refer to that 
doesn't change if they get moved to different physical ports.

	Barry