ZFS Kernel Panics with 32 and 64 bit versions of 8.3 and 9.0

[Michael Richards]

On Sun, May 6, 2012 at 10:59 AM, Bob Friesenhahn
<bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us> wrote:
> On Sun, 6 May 2012, Simon wrote:
>
>>
>> Are you suggesting that if a disk sector goes bad or memory corrupts few
>> blocks
>> of data, the entire zpool is gonna go bust? can the same occur with a
>> ZRAID?
>> I thought the ZFS was designed to overcome all these issues to begin with.
>> Is
>> this not the case?
>
>
> ZFS is designed to work with failing disks, but not failing memory. It is
> recommended to use only systems with ECC memory.
>
> The OS itself (any OS!) is succeptible to crash/corruption due to failing
> memory but without zfs's checksums, you might not be aware of such
> corruptions or the crash might be more delayed.

I can accept the fact that some filesystem corruption may have
happened from the bad RAM. The issue now is recovering it. All the
hardware has been replaced but I cannot import the ZFS pool without
causing a kernel panic and that is the the problem here. To me it
matters not if the corruption occurred from RAM or the hard disk - I
don't think it's a good idea to blindly trust any filesystem data. At
minimum fail to import the pool but don't bring the entire system to a
halt. This isn't even a system drive - it's purely data.