I'm Lori Alt, staff engineer at Sun Microsystems. I'm currently the project lead for the zfs boot project. The goal of the project is to enable zfs to be used as a root file system. I intend this blog to be a way to keep the OpenSolaris community informed about new developments in that area. I also hope for lots of comments about what direction the project should take.
Some background: I went to Washington University in St. Louis, graduating with bachelor's degrees in History and Computer Science, and a master's degree in CS. I've been at Sun since 1991. During my first six or so years at Sun, I was a member of the installation software group, mainly working on upgrade. I wish we had something like zfs back in those days. It would have made installation and upgrade so much easier! In more recent years, I've been a member of the file systems group, mainly working on ufs. I was the principal developer and project lead for the multi-terabyte UFS project. After that project shipped, I did some general UFS bug-fix work and then joined the zfs team with the specific assignment of making zfs bootable. Part of the reason I was chosen to lead that project was my background in install, since a big part of implementing a new root file system is the installation software to set it up and maintain it (through patching, upgrades, etc.)
I also wrote the "acr" part of bfu. Since I was the originator of the use of "class-action scripts" in Solaris packages for upgrading editable files, it was always very annoying to me to have to resolve conflicts manually after a bfu. So I wrote acr to do it automatically. (I must thank Bill Sommerfeld however for adding some nice enhancements to the acr code and actually getting it made part of the Solaris source. Before that, it was just an internal tool.)
So here's the latest on zfs boot:
The ON (Operating Environment and Networking) support for booting from zfs root file systems on x86 platforms was integrated into the Nevada source on March 29, thanks to the great work of my colleague Lin Ling. At that point (from build 62 on), it became possible to set up systems with a zfs root file system, either by a manual setup procedure or by using a kit to convert a standard install image into one that would support the profile-based installation of a system with zfs root.
Support is planned for sparc. More about that later.
So now that I've started this blog, I expect to be posting status regularly and presenting some of the issues that come up. I will welcome comments and input. You can also monitor the project at the zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org mailing list.
Posted by Tom on April 20, 2007 at 06:19 PM MDT #
I'm setting up a simple fileserver with ZFS as the storage backend. It's a 32-bit processor (dual PII 200mhz), so I'm wondering if checksum overhead will seriously affect performance. I've not seen any benchmarks. Any thoughts much appreciated, and thanks for your excellent work.
cheers,
Blake
Posted by Blake Irvin on May 16, 2007 at 01:42 PM MDT #
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