ZFS-only booting on FreeBSD

[Daniel Staal]

I've been reading over the ZFS-only-boot instructions linked here:
<http://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFS> (and further linked from there) and have one
worry:

Let's say I install a FreeBSD system using a ZFS-only filesystem into a
box with hotswapable hard drives, configured with some redundancy.  Time
passes, one of the drives fails, and it is replaced and rebuilt using the
ZFS tools.  (Possibly on auto, or possibly by just doing a 'zpool
replace'.)

Is that box still bootable?  (It's still running, but could it *boot*?)

Extend further: If *all* the original drives are replaced (not at the same
time, obviously) and rebuilt/resilvered using the ZFS utilities, is the
box still bootable?

If not, what's the minimum needed to support booting from another disk,
and using the ZFS filesystem for everything else?

Daniel T. Staal

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