Root on ZFS, LiveCD and BE

[Brandon J. Wandersee]

Victor Sudakov writes:

> Brandon J. Wandersee wrote:
>
>> Now, when you try to import a pool that was previously part of another
>> running system, `zpool` will tell you that "forcing" the import is the
>> only way to get the result you want. Doing so is safe; ZFS is just
>> concerned because its record shows that the pool was last seen attached
>> to a running system and it wasn't properly exported, and so wants to
>> make certain you aren't trying to use a pool on two different systems
>> simultaneously. So to sum up the past two paragraphs, importing the pool
>> should never have any effect at all beyond mounting the datasets, and
>> those datasets should always be in a clean state.
>
> This sounds reassuring. To make it more clear, do I need to export the
> production pool after the maintenance is finished?

Yes, you should. I want to say that the LiveCD exports any attached
pools before rebooting or shutting down, because on the couple occasions
I've forgotten to export a root-on-ZFS pool the system still booted up
fine. But I export the pool anyway just to keep everything clean.

> I'll check with the stable version of beadm  in bhyve tomorrow, but
> please note that BE selection made by beadm-devel itself (from a
> working system) works perfectly. It's only the loader BE selection
> menu that has this problem.

I just set up boot environments for the first time with sysutils/beadm
last week myself, so this seemed like as good a time as any to create
one and try it out. I get the same behavior: activating a boot
environment from a running system and rebooting works fine, but
selecting a boot environment from the boot menu fails. So it's probably
a problem with the loader. I'll comment on the bug report myself
shortly.

-- 
::  Brandon J. Wandersee
::  brandon.wandersee at gmail.com
::  --------------------------------------------------
::  'The best design is as little design as possible.'
::  --- Dieter Rams ----------------------------------