Ian Murdock wrote:
One thing I don't see on the requirements list is ZFS as the default
file system.
This really needs to be there. It's one of the killer features of
Solaris, and we should make sure we use it to maximum advantage.
Of course, to take maximum advantage of ZFS, the entire system needs to
be on ZFS, which means ZFS boot, which I assume is an installer task? Is
this on the installer roadmap? What needs to be done here? (This also
necessarily affects SPARC support, another requirement that
doesn't seem to be listed, which I'll discuss in a separate thread..)
The ZFS boot project is primarily being delivered by the ZFS team.
They're also doing the restricted ZFS support work on the installer
targeted for Solaris 10, whereas we (the Install team and community) are
responsible for the long-term solution. SPARC support requires the
newboot-SPARC project, which is currently yet another team.
Does putting the entire system on ZFS mean we can do away with
slice level partitioning? I found the whole slice thing confusing, and I
suspect I won't be the only one coming from Linux to be confused. I see
you can put swap on ZFS, but [2] seems to indicate that ZFS can only
boot from slices (though [1] says "[i]f you use a whole disk for a
rootpool, you must use a slice notation (e.g. c0d0s0) so that it is
labeled with an SMI label"--I'm too much of a noob to follow that).
[1] http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/boot/zfsboot-manual/
[2] http://blogs.sun.com/timf/entry/zfs_bootable_datasets_happily_rumbling
As Tim Foster noted, there are enhancements to ZFS required in order to
move swap and dump into the pool. For now, it needs to be a separate
slice, and that may well still be true for an initial release of
Indiana; we should probably check with the ZFS team on an anticipated
delivery date for those specific enhancements.
One big win if we can do everything in a ZFS pool is that we don't have
to worry about partitioning. Big simplification there.
Presumably, all "partitioning" becomes is resizing existing
partitions to make room for the Solaris (ZFS) partition,
and I see parted has been ported to Solaris, so we
could presumably use libparted in the Solaris installer?
If you want non-destructive resizing, then you need something like
libparted, though its support for doing so with NTFS left a great deal
to be desired when we evaluated it a year ago. Integrating it into an
installer is possible, though not something we have plans to fund at the
moment. I'm told that Vista can shrink itself, and since most Linux
users already have parted, is it acceptable to ask the user to perform
that task first in the native environment of the OS they already have
installed? A conservative point of view about data preservation would
seem to argue for that (and is why we've declined to make that move with
Solaris so far), but perhaps we don't want to be so conservative with
Indiana, and admittedly the user expectations here may be that we
should. My personal belief is that most users don't have any
appreciation for how risky it is to have Linux or OpenSolaris (or any
OS) attempting to reconfigure the storage of some alien OS, nor do those
same users likely have the system backups they should.
Dave
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