ZFS EFI IDE Support
Advanced technology like ZFS is a blog rich environment, so get ready for more blogs from me...
One thing that got released in the same build as ZFS is EFI label support for IDE (ATA,SATA) hard disks. The GEOM team did a nice job on this. This support allows us to do the following command, where c2d0 is an IDE disk:
$ zpool create testpool c2d0
Before this support was added you could only have slices of a SMI labeled disk in a zpool. Now you can add the whole IDE disk. EFI labels are important for many reasons, mainly that they provide support for one terabyte disks and larger. I am very familiar with this, since I was the test lead for the MTB (Multi-terabyte) UFS project which extended UFS to support 16 terabyte file systems. Early versions of ZFS were used for testing MTB UFS since with ZFS we could create sparse volumes of enormous size on very small disks. But, more on this another day... For now, all you home users with extra IDE drives and anyone else enjoy. You can run ZFS the way it is intended.
