Interview with Con Kolivas (APC)

Posted Jul 25, 2007 0:30 UTC (Wed) by zooko (guest, #2589)
In reply to: Interview with Con Kolivas (APC) by drag
Parent article: Interview with Con Kolivas (APC)

I'm pretty interested in OpenSolaris. I installed Nexenta CP on my new server, and it automatically detected my two hard drives and installed ZFS, mirrored on the two drives, for everything including boot! That was cool.

I've since had a lot of fun reporting bugs [1]. I haven't been in such a "target rich environment" for bug reporting since the good old days of Debian circa 1996!

[1] https://launchpad.net/nexenta

Solarix booting from ZFS?

Posted Jul 25, 2007 1:33 UTC (Wed) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (5 responses)

Last I heard, solarix wouldn't boot from a ZFS filesystem; the ZFS-via-FUSE-on-linux people were gloating that they had the only system that would boot from ZFS. Does solarix boot direct from ZFS now? (And, if so, does that mean somebody wrote Forth code that understands ZFS layout?)

Solarix booting from ZFS?

Posted Jul 25, 2007 1:48 UTC (Wed) by zooko (guest, #2589) [Link] (4 responses)

Yes, my Nexenta CP install boots from a ZFS filesystem. Or else it pulls some kind of fast one on me, and leaves me with a running system that *claims* that the only filesystem present is ZFS...

Just kidding. It really is ZFS boot:

http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/opensolaris-discuss...

This is Solaris/x86, not Solaris/Sparc, and I think it doesn't use the Forth bootloader, but I'm not sure.

Solarix booting from ZFS?

Posted Jul 25, 2007 1:57 UTC (Wed) by pjdc (guest, #6906) [Link] (3 responses)

Solaris x86 uses grub and an initrd-like arrangement ("boot archive"), so I guess they just sling the zfs junk in there.

Solarix booting from ZFS?

Posted Jul 25, 2007 2:47 UTC (Wed) by pjdc (guest, #6906) [Link] (2 responses)

Of course that can't be the whole story. Grub still needs to read the boot archive somehow. The Solaris 10 box I have access to doesn't seem to have a /boot/grub/zfs_stage1_5, but I do get a whopping three hit on Google for "zfs_stage1_5".

Solarix booting from ZFS?

Posted Jul 25, 2007 16:03 UTC (Wed) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

GRUB ZFS stage1.5 source code

It's pretty difficult to find, you have to go to cvs.opensolaris.org and search for 'zfs', and scroll down a bit. Really obscure..

;)

Solarix booting from ZFS?

Posted Jul 25, 2007 21:16 UTC (Wed) by akumria (guest, #7773) [Link]

Grub still needs to read the boot archive somehow.

Indeed. I believe they use Sun GPLv2 ZFS code to do so.