Bug#761432: partman-zfs: set sync=disabled during install
Package: partman-zfs
Version: 36
Severity: wishlist
User: debian-bsd@lists.debian.org
Usertags: kfreebsd
X-Debbugs-CC: debian-bsd@lists.debian.org
Hi,
On GNU/Linux it has been suggested before to use 'eatmydata' - a syscall
wrapper making synchronous writes asynchronous - while running
debian-installer.
We shouldn't need synchronous writes while installing, because if
interrupted, the target isn't expected to be in a usable state anyway.
It allows the installer to run somewhat faster if the time taken to
commit data to disk is significant (i.e. almost anything except SSDs or
ramdisk).
For installs to ZFS, we could use the sync=disabled option for this. In
the commit.d hook we could set that option on newly-created ZFS
filesystems, then at the end of the install in the finish.d hook, reset
it to the default sync=standard setting. The finish.d hook is always
expected to run to get a usable system (this is when zfsutils gets
installed).
I suggest to measure the time taken to do test-installs with/without
this tweak to see if it could be worth doing.
Regards,
--
Steven Chamberlain
steven@pyro.eu.org
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