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Re: Reworked ZFS support in D-I, testers wanted



Hi Robert,

Thanks for your response. 

I've pulled down the latest image from:

http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/daily-builds/daily/arch-latest/kfreebsd-amd64/iso-cd/

to test today.  The buildd at this time showed kfreebsd-amd64 as version (9).  Here are my notes:

ZFS partitions were detected as ext4.

I was unable to destroy a pool from the menu.  I needed to switch to a shell and "zpool destroy" to get rid of any existing configuration.

Using multi disk pools looks to work perfect.  Naming pools worked like magic.  I especially like the ability to create pools without partitions!

It seems that the workflow only permits you to create a pool for creating logical volumes rather than using the pool directly.  In the wheezy installer I tested last weekend, exactly the opposite is true, in that you create a pool to be used directly, albeit in a partition.

Upon creating a zfs volume on a zpool, I received an error that the creation of partition #1 has failed.  Though, checking the console I can see system, system/slash and system/slashs1.  Inspection of the system/slash zfs volume show that it has type "volume".  I think that the default should be filesystem, or at least give the user the opportunity to choose the type.  The error I received may have been due to attempting to create the zfs fileystem when no such formatting needed to be done.  I was able to move on with the rest of the installation.

I would also like the ability to make use of the zpool directly as my root filesystem.  In my opinion, making "volumes" is a useful bit for certain things like iscsi and such where it is required, but I think flexibility for local storage goes out the window when its done this way and using type "filesystem" (zfs default) is preferred since you don't have to chew off a chunk of storage capacity up front.  Is this because of a d-i limitation of some kind?  I know I want to have and eat my cake.

Installation completed without further errors.  Reboot failed with checksum invalid and bailed out to a grub rescue prompt.

I think this is great work and headed in the right direction.  Please let me know how I can help.

Zach


On Sun, Jul 31, 2011 at 1:16 PM, Robert Millan <rmh@debian.org> wrote:
Hi Zach

2011/7/31 Zach JL <xaque208@gmail.com>:
> I think that the user should be given a chance to enter a name for the zpool
> during installation in the same way that when installing Linux, the user has
> a chance to enter the name of a Volume Group for LVM root.

I think you'll be interested in:

partman-zfs (8) unstable; urgency=low

 * Redesign ZFS pool management (mostly based on partman-lvm).  New
features include:
   - Support for ZFS pools with multiple physical devices.
   - Support for multiple filesystems within a ZFS pool.
   - Support for legacy filesystems using ZFS volumes (ZVOL).
   - Arbitrary names for ZFS pools, filesystems and ZVOLs.

 -- Robert Millan <rmh@debian.org>  Sun, 31 Jul 2011 21:51:47 +0200

which has just been uploaded to unstable.

Please test!

> The second bit I would like to add, is that it shouldn't be mandatory to use
> partitions at all when using ZFS from the installer.  ZFS is perfectly
> capable of using disks without any partitions on them at all, and from
> my understanding of using ZFS in this way, it will actually improve
> performance because you are giving the filesystem access to write cache on
> the disk.  See this link for more about that:
> http://www.solarisinternals.com/wiki/index.php/ZFS_Best_Practices_Guide#Storage_Pools

I know about the write cache issue, but I'm not sure how can this fit
into partman's workflow.  AFAIK partman always wants a partition
label.  This might require changes to other parts of D-I.

--
Robert Millan



--
Zach

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