ZFS Panic after freebsd-update

[Rainer Duffner]

Am 01.07.2013 um 20:56 schrieb "Steven Hartland" <killing at multiplay.co.uk>:

> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Scott Sipe" <cscotts at gmail.com>
>> So I realize that neither 8.2-RELEASE or 8.4-RELEASE are stable, but I
>> ultimately wasn't sure where the right place to go for discuss 8.4 is?
>> Beyond the FS mailing list, was there a better place for my question? I'll
>> provide the other requested information (zfs outputs, etc) to wherever
>> would be best.
>> This is a production machine (has been since late 2010) and after tweaking
>> some ZFS settings initially has been totally stable. I wasn't incredibly
>> closely involved in the initial configuration, but I've done at least one
>> binary freebsd-update previously.
>> Before this computer I had always done source upgrades. ZFS (and the
>> thought of a panic like the one I saw this weekend!) made me leery of doing
>> that. We're a small business--we have this server, an offsite backup
>> server, and a firewall box. I understand that issues like this are are
>> going to happen when I don't have a dedicated testing box, I just like to
>> try to minimize them and keep them to weekends!
>> It sounds like my best bet might be to add a new UFS disk, do a clean
>> install of 9.1 onto that disk, and then import my existing ZFS pool?
> 
> There should be no reason why 8.4-RELEASE shouldn't work fine.
> 
> Yes ZFS is continuously improving and these fixes / enhancements first hit
> head / current and are then MFC'ed back to stable/9 & stable/8, but that
> doesn't mean the release branches should be avoided.
> 
> If you can I would try booting from a 8.4-RELEASE cdrom / iso to see
> if it can successfully read the pool as this could eliminate out of sync
> kernel / world issues.



Personally, I find mfsbsd much more practical for booting up a "rescue-environment".
Also, if 8.4 does not work for some reason - maybe try 8.3?

I have quite a lot of systems running 8.3 (and even more with 9.1) but none of them do zfsroot and none of them stresses ZFS very much.
I've so far resisted the urge to update to 8.4.

The reason why I would be interested to run zfs-root is that sometimes, you only have two hard drives and still want to do ZFS on it.

Ideally, though, FreeBSD would be able to do something like SmartOS (one of the few features I kind of like about it…), where you boot from an USB-image (or ideally, via (i)PXE) but use all the available space for data and (3rd-party) software. That way, you always have something to boot from, but can maximize the usage of spindles and space.
A basic FreeBSD install is, I think, less than 0.5G these days - I really hate wasting two 300 (or even 600) GB SAS hard disks just for that.