On Thursday 01 February 2007 03:49 pm, Sarah Jelinek wrote:
> > Were you planning on using ZFS for /export/home?  I guess that also
> > brings up the issue of configuring zpools.
>
> We could. Or, we could use UFS. I don't think we have decided that far
> down the road yet on the non-root fs layout details. We have plans to
> configure the root pool for sure.

I hope when it's all said and done, zfs is used for all.

We now live in a mixed world where a zfs filesytem co-exists with traditional 
directories (i.e., one created with mkdir), and this is bad, IMO, as it 
exists today as the directory can be at the root, where zfs should always be 
at the root. Case in point for /opt, /var, or any other mount as we know it 
today. When zfs is the root filesystem, this will not be a problem, but the 
question still arises if we create a zfs filesytem or if we create a 
directory, for each of these entities.

As for /export/home, I'm kinda against it completely, since with zfs I like to 
set things up with a zpool (tank, as an example since I always use it...just 
a bad habit of following what the zfs team started), and create a zfs 
filesystem for home under that, where all home directories would go. For my 
own systems I edit /etc/auto_home with an entry such as:

* localhost:/tank/home/&

So that all local home directories are mounted from the zpool.

None of this works correctly on an update/install, as you know, so upgrades 
are painful today!;-)

Back to /export/home, it seems that it's carried over today for tradition, 
it's always been like that. The above shows a similar redirection I use for 
zfs on my own systems today, at least similar to having an additional layer 
as /export/home has always been. Hopefully this type of structure can be 
applied to Solaris rather than carrying around old baggage, such as 
/export/home. I know, I know...old habits are hard to break, and we have most 
customers using /export/home today as well. But we need to adapt to our 
technology, IMO.

I was thinking about this the other day, and was coming to the conclusion that 
multiple zpools could make sense, if we wanted to have a "system" filesystem 
that would contain much of the stuff we see today, like /opt, /var, /tmp, 
even /etc or /usr, there's a lot of possibilities. let's say there was a 
zpool named "system", and there was system/etc, system/var, system/tmp, 
etc...off of it, and we had a "user" zpool where user/applications or similar 
could be stored. I think this would be much better than creating /opt, /var, 
/tmp, or others as we do today.

-- 

Alan DuBoff - Solaris x86 Engineering - IHV/OEM Group
Advocate of Insourcing at Sun, hire people that care about our company!





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