Comments on: ZFS - neat system, still can’t boot into it?

By: dru

dru — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 20:25:05 +0000

hey sic,

that is exactly what I'm trying to avoid in my old age.

the main point of the article was this: when you release a great technology like ZFS... please take care of the details.

By: Sic

Sic — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 18:58:31 +0000

We're booting off of UFS with ZFS root, but our UFS is mirrored. Here's some output of some system commands, with irrelevant parts removed:

$ zfs list NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT axmstr 154M 433G 154M /mnt/axmstr intdisk 991M 110G 1.50K legacy intdisk/root 991M 110G 991M legacy

$ mount / on intdisk/root /ufsroot on /dev/md/dsk/d30

It sucks that we can't setup the system this way entirely via jumpstart, but I have a simple "setupzfs" mass script that I use before installing packages. So, /ufsroot is extremely minimal, with no installed packages etc, and the setup is entirely automated.

$ df -h Filesystem size used avail capacity Mounted on intdisk/root 111G 991M 110G 1% / /dev/md/dsk/d30 567M 298M 213M 59% /ufsroot

By: Nick

Nick — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 02:19:37 +0000

It’s highly unlikely that ZFS will be bootable in Mac OS X 10.5, let alone the default system. It would require changes to both OpenFirmware (on PowerPC Macs) and EFI (on Intel Macs) and 10.5 is late as it is. I guess we’ll find out in a couple of days.

By: dru

dru — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 19:42:32 +0000

Until Leopard ships, we don’t really know that. I suspect that the BIOS would have to be adjusted to accomodate that.

By: Jake McArthur

Jake McArthur — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 15:15:23 +0000

ZFS is going to be available in the next version of Mac OS X, and rumor has it that it will be the default filesystem, implying that it is going to be bootable.

By: brad walker

brad walker — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 22:02:26 +0000

zfs boot support is available in recent nevada builds of opensolaris: http://milek.blogspot.com/2007/03/latest-zfs-add-ons.html