ZFS Boot/7.2-STABLE

[Jaime Bozza]

After much work and looking at all the different configurations, I have a running 7.2-STABLE (amd64) system running ZFS only with no partitions.   Unfortunately, this required a couple of things.

First - The patch here: 
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2009-June/050518.html

(just the patch to nfs.c - the other one is already in the tree)

Next, I re-enabled ZFS support in /sys/boot/i386/Makefile

Finally, I rebuilt and installed libstand, then rebuilt and installed the boot loader.   Once I had those pieces, my ZFS-only system booted fine.  

I've read the problems that caused the ZFS support to be backed out.  Could ZFS Boot (loader) support be something optional that isn't a default?   This would allow those who want to use ZFS Boot the ability without needing to move to 8.0 (which still isn't out officially).

I'd have no problems rebuilding world to enable ZFS Boot on a new system, but currently I'd have to remember to re-patch libstand and the loader Makefile each time I updated, or move to 8.0, which I'm not quite ready to do.   

At the very least, can someone MFC the libstand patch?  The link above is basically the diff between 7.x and 8.x for the nfs.c file.

Jaime Bozza