andrewk9 wrote:
Apologies: I've just realised all this talk of "I've booted off of ZFS" is totally bogus.
What they've actually done is booted off Ext3FS, for example, then jumped into loading the
"real" root from the zpool. That'll teach me to read things first. This is indeed a
pretty ugly hack.
The only obstacle, as I see it, to getting *real* RAIDZ / RAIDZ2 boot support is adding the requisite code for reading the zpool into Grub. There was also some discussion that on some systems, the ZFS grub plugin would be unable to reliably access large numbers of disks due to BIOS bugs / limitations on x86.
Correct, only one disk at a time can be accessed. This is the
problem, since on RAID-Z, files can be spread all over
the disks in the pool. With simple mirroring, you are
guaranteed that each file can be read, in its entirety, from
a single disk.
Booting from RAID-Z is planned for the second release
of zfs boot. The design is unclear, but it will probably
involve a new dataset option (the"replicate on all disks
in the pool" option) which will enable us to make sure
that the files needed for booting can be read from a single
disk.
This begs the question: does Sun have a version of the ZFS Grub plugin that
*can* read (however un-reliably) from a RAIDZ pool?
No.
Lori
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