[geeks] Pure ZFS machine - possible?

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Fri, 10 Nov 2006, Mark Benson wrote:

> Maybe if you use a small, say 9GB, disk as your swap and '/' and only
> partitioned those during the install, then directly after that stage
> in the installer (trying to remember the sequence here) dropped to a
> console and setup your zpool and filesystems, and mounted them to the
> required directory (which I can't remember off the top of my head, is
> it '/a' ?)so the installer assumes them to be subdirs of the created
> root filesystem.

You could probably get Solaris installed that way.

However, I think the problem is that there's no zfsboot program to act
as an analog to ufsboot.  While your kernel may have support for ZFS,
without a bootloader that knows how to find the kernel in the
filesystem, the system will not be startable.

There's almost certainly a zfsboot program in development which you
could -probably- hack into a Solaris 10 install that you've coerced onto
a ZFS filesystem.  However, if you're going to venture that far out into
the weeds, why not just run the bleeding-edge Solaris development/beta
releases, where zfsboot will likely appear first?

-- 
Jonathan Patschke  ) "Some people grow out of the petty theft of
Elgin, TX         (   childhood.  Others grow up to be CEOs and
USA                )  politicians."              --Forrest Black