Torrey McMahon wrote:
Jason King wrote:
Anxiously anticipating the ability to boot off zfs, I know there's
been some talk about leveraging some of the snapshotting/cloning
features in conjunction with upgrades and patches.
What I am really hoping for is the ability to clone /, patch the
clone, then boot off the clone (by doing a clone swap).
I'm pretty sure we already have what you are looking for. Check out
Live Upgrade on docs.sun.com.
Right now, liveupgrade makes lots of assumptions about boot environments
being in ufs file systems, but fixing that is part of the zfs-boot
plan. So yes, the kinds
of things you can do with liveupgrade, such as cloning environments and then
patching or upgrading them, and then activating them, will be possible with
zfs bootable environments (and will be a lot faster and easier, since
cloning will be
almost instantaneous and will not require a preallocated slice).
I'm not sure what will turn out to be a "gotcha" for you, so let me just
describe
the basics of how zfs booting will work. Some storage pools will be
designated
as "root pools", which means that they contain at least one dataset that
contains
a bootable root file system. There will be some restrictions on root pools
(the only allowed configuration is an n-way mirror of single disks or
slices,
each of which must be accessible from the boot prom or BIOS), so best
practice will be to keep data (such as database tables) in a pool separate
from the root pool. (The separation isn't required but will probably turn
out to be best for ease of management.)
Some datasets will be designated as "bootable", which means that they
contain
a root file system. A bootable environment (BE, in LiveUpgrade terminology)
can consist of several datasets, exactly one of which is "bootable".
For example, it will be desirable in many cases to put each zone root in a
separate dataset. Each of those zone root datasets will be subordinate to a
"bootable" dataset which contains the root of the BE. Cloning a BE means
cloning each dataset in the BE.
We in the zfs-boot project owe the community more information about
how the work is progressing. I hope we can get more of that information
out fairly soon.
Lori
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