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OpenSolaris Boot Support For ZFS Root FS on x86 and SPARC

Posted by timothy on Sun Apr 20, 2008 01:17 PM
from the devilish-wings-spread-wider dept.
Sun Microsystems Operating Systems Software Unix BSD
Derkjan de Haan writes "I am glad to see progress is being made on the the ability of OpenSolaris to boot from a ZFS filesystem: 'This putback provides the ability to boot the Solaris Operating System from a ZFS root file system on both x86 and SPARC platforms. Full ZFS boot and install support will be available in a subsequent build. Because of the phased putback, we recommend waiting for the full boot and install support rather than attempting to use the ZFS boot features separately.'"
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Submission: boot support from ZFS root fs on x86 and SPARC by Anonymous Coward
[+] Technology: OpenSolaris Indiana Released 359 comments
Lally Singh writes "The Linux-friendly OpenSolaris Indiana has been released! A new, modern package manager and all the goodies of Solaris: ZFS, DTrace, SMF, and Xen on a LiveCD that was designed for Linux users. 'Why use the OpenSolaris OS you ask? It's pretty simple, you'll find it full of unique features like the new Image Packaging System (IPS), ZFS as the default filesystem, DTrace enabled packages for extreme observability and performance tuning, and many many more. We think you'll be quite happy to came by to take a look!'"
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OpenSolaris Boot Support For ZFS Root FS on x86 and SPARC 50 Comments More /

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  • Am I missing something? (Score:4, Informative)

    by TheRaven64 (641858) on Sunday April 20 2008, @01:21PM (#23135572) Homepage Journal
    This is an article about System V UNIX, and it's in the BSD category and tagged bsd. WTF?

  • Honk! Honk! (Score:5, Informative)

    by tripwirecc (1045528) on Sunday April 20 2008, @01:23PM (#23135582)
    The OpenSolaris distribution can already install ZFS root and boot, based on the previous putback. This current putback makes it more robust, especially when it comes to finding the root device after having been swapped to a different port. What's still missing is multidisk pool and RAID-Z boot support.
    • SunOS and subsequently Solaris, as inherited in OpenSolaris, the subject of this article, are AT&T UNIX System V derivatives, not from the Berkely Software Distribution (BSD) of UNIX. You're offtopic, my dear.

      • SunOS and subsequently Solaris, as inherited in OpenSolaris, the subject of this article, are AT&T UNIX System V derivatives, not from the Berkely Software Distribution (BSD) of UNIX.

        SunOS was BSD. Solaris is AT&T. See Wikipedia or something for the details of Sun's confusing naming and numbering scheme.

  • Booting isn't so interesting (Score:4, Interesting)

    by bhima (46039) * <Bhima,Pandava&gmail,com> on Sunday April 20 2008, @01:57PM (#23135808) Journal
    I don't think booting from ZFS is all that interesting. I think expanding a RAID-Z pool is far more interesting: http://blogs.sun.com/ahl/entry/expand_o_matic_raid_z [sun.com]

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by TheRaven64 (641858)
      The reason booting is important is twofold. First, it means that you can simplify your configuration by having all of all of your disks managed by the ZFS storage pool manager. Secondly, it means that you get all of the nice transactional features from ZFS on your boot partition. If you upgrade your kernel or some modules to a broken one (for example) then you can easily restore to a previous snapshot at the next boot.
    • Yawn. People willing to pay for Veritas File System have been able to do this for 10 years on the Solaris platform.

      While I like ZFS, it's really not all that "NEW". It's just a re-implementation of things available commercially.

      That makes it inexpensive, which is good for many -- but critical systems have been doing this kind of disk management for a very long time now.

  • Who cares about BSD... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Marcion (876801) on Sunday April 20 2008, @03:25PM (#23136394) Homepage Journal
    ... when does Linux get ZFS?

    • Re: (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Never, it is CDDL, and Linus won't have that in his baby.
      • This is one of my main criticisms of the GPL, the licensing is overly strict. It just makes no sense whatsoever to have to rewrite things which have source available under an open source license just because it has to be GPL. Writing that into the license itself is just a nice way of saying sod off to projects that use other licenses. Apart from that, it could have its own home in the source and just be linked in where necessary. Depending upon the license, it isn't necessarily even going to change anythin
        • If the CDDL and GPL were compatible, then Sun would have chosen a different license that was incompatible with the GPL.

    • Re:Who cares about BSD... (Score:5, Informative)

      by TheRaven64 (641858) on Sunday April 20 2008, @03:56PM (#23136586) Homepage Journal
      First, in spite of the section, this article has nothing to do with BSD - it is about Solaris, which is a System V derivative. FreeBSD also has ZFS support, but does not have more than very limited support for ZFS booting (and none in the stable release, I believe).

      As to when Linux will get support for ZFS, it requires one of two things to happen. Either Linux developers need to do a clean-room reimplementation of ZFS, or they need to modify their license to one that isn't incompatible with many other Free Software licenses , including the CDDL.

      • You missed the most likely option...

        Or Linux needs to get user mode filesystems up to the point you can store your mission-critical data on them.

        ZFS has been written ported to linux, I tried it last year but one of my tests was to pull power to the drive while it was mounted (but not doing anything) I lost all data on the drive beyond (easy) recovery. My conclusion, it isn't ready for use on a Linux server yet.

        • FUSE is quite stable. It's ZFS FUSE that's unstable.

          -:sigma.SB

          • I can believe that, though I haven't tested FUSE for much other than ZFS (just mythtvfs and sshfs and both for fun at home rather than production use). I also believe the ZFS code is stable and not prone to corrupting drives when power is lost.

            The problem is the current linux implmenetation of ZFS-FUSE.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by aliquis (678370)
      http://zfs-on-fuse.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com]

      Except on fuse either when Sun goes GPL 2, or when both Sun and Linux goes GPL 3, or if Linux stop being GPL at all but uhm, yeah right ..
      • You know we wont know 'til the day Steve Jobs announces it. I'm guessing it will be a while.
      • I'm guessing it'll be 10.6 before it becomes official. Apple will let it hit the wild and see if there are any issues. I don't think they'll roll that out in a 10.5.x update. It'll be a big feature announcement when Steve demos 10.6 for the first time.
    • It requires some rouge kernel hackers that dont care about licensing, you know the kind the drive round on motor bikes, and break into Steve Ballmers office and upload from his desktop, not because they're too cheap to pay for an internet connection, but simply because they wanted chairs to patch up the holes in their pirate ship that's waiting of the cost.

      Yup the day we get those sort of rouge kernel hackers well get zfs in linux, but until then due to suns choice of license its not going to happen any soo
      • "It requires some rouge kernel hackers that dont care about licensing"

        Unfortunately, Linux kernel hackers are mostly license conscious. I also hear that they are mostly azure, like the Smurfs.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by swordgeek (112599)
      Whenever the Linux zealots feel like putting down the "one-True-Holy-license" pitchforks and start to implement it.

      The code is out there. You're welcome to use it following the license under which it was released.
      • Um, what? It is not possible to put the zfs code into the kernel. It would be illegal to do so. Putting down pitchforks would not solve this problem.

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