[geeks] ZFS boot issues, was Re: operating systems to replace Solaris

[Shannon]

On 13-Apr-2011 14:25, Mike Meredith wrote:
> On Wed, 13 Apr 2011 07:41:46 -0400, Shannon wrote:
>> What I did was create a pool called pool0, and following ZFS best
>> practices I do not mount this, I use it as a container for the rest.
>> The FreeBSD ZFS root wiki uses the primary pool directly, but best
>> practices says to avoid that for flexibility and maintenance.
> 
> Hmm ... there's best practice and then there's what actually works. I
> went with the root on pool root way.

Yea... to be honest I'm not sure I really need to bother with a
container pool.

That's one thing I like about VMWare... I can play around before
comitting on the real hardware.

> I was going to suggest that perhaps vfs.root.mountfrom should contain
> just the pool name given that the bootfs property is set. But it seems
> that's not what this guy did :-
> 
> http://www.b0rken.org/freebsd/zfs.html

That command is supposed to tell what to mount for root, and pool0/zroot
is the root FS.

> I can't see anything obvious in there that you wouldn't have done (and
> nothing really tricky either).

Yea, none of this seems hard at all, which makes it that much more
puzzling why it is failing.

I read through the rc scripts and can't even figure out why it would
fail.  I tested everything it does to that point manually and it works fine.

>> When I enter single user shell pool0/zroot is mounted as /, but is
>> temporarily readonly so boot halts. If I do this:
>>
>> % zfs set readonly=off pool0/zroot
> 
> I don't suppose the pool is read only ?

Nope, its readonly=off on pool0 and the rest inherit.

Only /var/empty is marked read-only.

I might just either try again, or just forget using a container pool to
keep it simpler.