ZFS root file system - The dot in ... --- ...

The dot in ... --- ...

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Tuesday April 18, 2006

ZFS root file system

As Tabriz has pointed out you can now do “boot and switch” to get yourself a ZFS root file system so to give this a bit of a work out I flipped out build system to use it. It has a compressed root file system now.

: pod5.eu FSS 1 $; df -h /
Filesystem             size   used  avail capacity  Mounted on
tank/rootfs             19G   2.9G    16G    16%    /
: pod5.eu FSS 2 $;

The instructions Tabriz gives are slightly different if you are using live upgrade to keep those old UFS boot environments in sync. For a start if you use a build 37 BE that is not currently the one you are booted off for the source of your new zfs root file system then you don't have to do all the steps creating mount points and /devices.

So steps 6, 7 and 9 distil to:

lumount a build 37 archive on /a:

lumount -n b37 /a
Copy that archive into /zfsroot;

# cd /a
# find . -xdev -depth -print | cpio -pvdm /zfsroot

You do have to take greater care when updating the boot archive as that may not live on the currently booted boot environment but apart from that it was a breeze. The system has been up for almost a week and I have a clone of a snapshot that is also bootable just in case I mess up the original. Doing that was as simple as taking the clone and editing /etc/vfstab and /etc/system in it to reflect it's new name. Then building it's boot archive.

# zfs list
NAME                   USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT
tank                  2.90G  15.8G     9K  /tank
tank/rootfs           2.90G  15.8G  2.89G  legacy
tank/rootfs@works     2.38M      -  2.77G  -
tank/rootfs@daytwo    1.71M      -  2.88G  -
tank/rootfs@daythree  1.89M      -  2.88G  -
tank/rootfs@dayfour    576K      -  2.89G  -
tank/rootfs2            51K  15.8G  2.88G  legacy
tank/scratch          98.5K  15.8G  98.5K  /tank/scratch
tank/scratch@x            0      -  98.5K  -
#