ZFS Boot Support from Installer

[Tim Judd]

On 8/14/09, Tim Gustafson <tjg at soe.ucsc.edu> wrote:
>> Valid point.  I didn't make the clarification that I should
>> have. graid3 and gmirror have reached the maturity and
>> dedicated to the system, whereas ZFS is still experimental.
>> When ZFS is no longer considered experimental, I would expect
>> ZFS support in the installer in the same expectation I am
>> expecting graid3 and gmirror to be.
>>
>> It's all about the status of ZFS itself, rather than the fact
>> that it works.
>
> Your point is also valid.  However, our experience with ZFS on the boxes
> that we have installed it has been nothing but positive since about 7.2, and
> Steve Bertrand has also posted that his experiences have been nothing but
> positive.  I know that ZFS on FreeBSD hasn't gotten a "stable" rating yet,
> but it appears to be approaching that level and I don't think putting it in
> the installer (and perhaps marking it as "beta") so that more people could
> test it and give feedback about bugs and their experiences would be a bad
> thing.
>
> To be clear, ZFS itself is indeed stable - our Solaris file servers are
> running it in multi-terabyte configurations on servers that get pounded to
> the order of nearly saturating a 1GB LAN link.  ZFS is the only file system
> in our experience that has suffered no data losses in arrays with more than
> one terabyte (knock on wood).  All other file systems have failed
> disastrously for us in multi-terabyte configurations.  So what you're
> talking about is not the stability of ZFS itself, but the port of ZFS on
> FreeBSD.

Exactly.  I've used ZFS once, on the box that could benefit from it
most.  It's a Dell PowerVault 715n NAS, which runs BSD very solid.
i386 Pentium 3 @1GHZ, and 1GB RAM.  This is back on 7.0 days, and I
haven't run it since.  I didn't loose any data, because the data on
the ZFS was unimportant data that could be lost.  It did freak out and
panic when I was copying an ISO to/from it.

I know that somewhere in 7.2 there was some tuning recommendations on
i386, and that 8.0 has an updated version of ZFS that I will run again
to try it out.  I don't have any amd64 (none!) systems, so this box
has to be tortured to be able to even experiment with ZFS.

>
>> Does this paint a better picture to you of what I forgot to
>> clarify in my original posting?
>
> Yes, clarity is key.  Thanks!  :)
>
> Tim Gustafson
> Baskin School of Engineering
> UC Santa Cruz
> tjg at soe.ucsc.edu
> 831-459-5354
>