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20080616 Monday June 16, 2008


ZFS boot saves the day...

I installed Solaris 2008.05 on my laptop a short while ago. Being my usual goofy self I was playing around as root in places I shouldn't have been and managed to really mess things up and render my machine totally unbootable. It was nosediving within a small fraction of a second after booting... I only had one kernel image, and that file had been overwritten :-( Ending up in an infinite reboot loop. In past days, with either Linux or Solaris, I'd have reinstalled the system, possibly preceded by ripping the disk out and plugging it into another machine so that I could rescue any important files. But since 2008.05 uses ZFS for everything - even the root filesystem, all I had to do was boot the 2008.05 LiveCD, zfs rollback the root filesystem, and like magic all my screwing around was undone. Permalink Comments [2]

Comments:

I too installed Opensolaris 2008.05 in my Dell Dimension 3000. I liked it very much, especially for the ease of setting up the developer environment and the concise documentation. But had to switch back to Ubuntu because of the power consumption :-( The CPU fan went crazy.

Posted by Anand on June 16, 2008 at 06:29 PM PDT #

Note that there is some CPU power management available although it's not enabled by default. For some details, see http://defect.opensolaris.org/bz/show_bug.cgi?id=1636

Posted by David Comay on June 16, 2008 at 08:31 PM PDT #

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