Tabriz's Weblog

ZFS Boot

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ZFS Boot

More than fancy footware.

I started working on ZFS in January of 2004. At that time, I was given the task of making ZFS bootable. A year and a half later, the prototype was up and running. While still a work in progress (ZFS boot is not currently available in the Solaris code base), I want to share some of the progress the ZFS Boot team has made.

What is ZFS Boot?

The ZFS Boot project is comprised of Lori Alt, Bill Ricker, and myself ( Tabriz Leman ). Together, we are working to provide the ability to boot the Solaris Operating System from a ZFS root filesystem as well as install the Solaris Operating System to a ZFS filesystem.

The ZFS Boot project has been divided into three pieces: x86 boot, sparc boot, and install. I have been tasked with getting the Solaris operating system to boot from a ZFS filesystem on an x86 machine. And...a day before my birthday, a great present came in the form of a successful zfs boot!

August 1st at 4:31pm marked the first successful x86 boot. At this time, the Solaris Operating System made it up to single user mode. After some help from Jeff Bonwick, the system booted to a fully operational state at 6:00pm that same day. Below is some output from that happy day.

SunOS Release 5.11 Version tabriz_[zfs-mountroot]_08/01/05 64-bit
Copyright 1983-2005 Sun Microsystems, Inc.  All rights reserved.
Use is subject to license terms.
DEBUG enabled
Hostname: co-jack
NIS domain name is it.sfbay.sun.com
checking ufs filesystems
/dev/rdsk/c0d0s7: is logging.
co-jack console login:
*****************************************************************************
*
* Starting Desktop Login on display :0...
*
* Wait for the Desktop Login screen before logging in.
*
*****************************************************************************
co-jack console login: root
Password:
Sun Microsystems Inc.   SunOS 5.11      snv_18  Jun. 21, 2005
SunOS Internal Development:  root 2005-06-21 [onnv_18]
bfu'ed from /ws/onnv-gate/archives/i386/snv_18 on 2005-07-19
Sun Microsystems Inc.   SunOS 5.11      snv_16  October 2007

# mount
/ on pool/fs  read/write/setuid/devices/dev=43c0000 on Wed Dec 31
16:00:00 1969
/devices on /devices read/write/setuid/devices/dev=4380000 on Mon Aug  1
19:48:25 2005
/system/contract on ctfs read/write/setuid/devices/dev=4400001 on Mon Aug  1
19:48:25 2005
...
...

Keep tuned for more exciting updates on ZFS boot and install.

Posted at 12:55PM Nov 16, 2005 by tabriz in ZFS  |  Comments[29]