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http://blogs.sun.com/tabriz/date/20051116 Wednesday November 16, 2005

ZFS Boot

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[24]

Comments:

Really -- all you need to do is add ZFS support to Grub. Then you're done

Posted by GRand Unified Bootloader on November 17, 2005 at 07:18 AM PST #

Grub was ported to Solaris in April 2005 by the New Boot project. Four months later, the ZFS boot team had the ZFS grub plugin prototype written and working. The entire ZFS boot solution is, however, slightly more complex and includes SPARC boot and Solaris Install, both of which are actively being worked on. Solaris on SPARC does not use the grub architecture, thus the boot solution in this space is slightly different. The team will post updates to this space as the SPARC boot solution matures.

Posted by Tabriz Leman on November 17, 2005 at 11:26 AM PST #

Happy Birthday Leman ;-) i saw this blog boot zfs on x86 ! good job! one thing for mention, it seems grub needs to patch so that support zfs boot section.right? Where is grub patch ???Do u have any docs/howto cook this issue?? Thanks

Posted by axa on November 20, 2005 at 07:47 AM PST #

My bussiness just bought two SUN X2100. I would kill to install&boot the system entirely under ZFS. Any release date? Thanks for this efford.

Posted by Jesus Cea on November 22, 2005 at 05:46 AM PST #

These comments are great, keep them coming! To address the last two comments, the ZFS boot release scehdule has not been finalized, but I feel your urgency. We, the boot team, hope to have a schedule finalized by the end of this year. At that time, I hope to have a more precise date for you.

Posted by Tabriz Leman on November 22, 2005 at 10:22 AM PST #

If zfs can be booted, I might be compelled to deploy OpenSolaris over Linux.

Posted by christopher baus on November 23, 2005 at 07:26 AM PST #

1 more....

From your note: "The ZFS Boot project has been divided into three pieces: x86 boot, sparc boot, and install. "

This is very cool, but I hope there is room for 1 more "section/piece" as part of your efforts. (if its not already captured under the above)

This basically involves ZFS snapshots/cloning.

The idea would be to before your change-window/patching, take an ATOMIC snapshot either from some single-user boot-mode, or other safe way to preserve (system-wide-point-in-time) state.

These "clones/snapshots" can then be used 1 a couple of different ways:

1) mount the snapshots RW & do liveUpgrades on them.
2) use them as "multiboot" options, where at the GRUB/OBP level, you can boot from either (one or more) the snapshots/clones, Or the original volumes, essentially changing the system's personality/point-in-time based on patch-sets, changes, etc.
3) as some for of atomic backout option, where you basically return the system to the EXACT-STATE it was before you made changes/applied patches, etc.

The above changes will fundamentally affect the way we do business, and perform administration, especialyl in the enterprise space.

Thanks, and keep up the good work.

-- MikeE

Posted by 192.223.226.6 on November 23, 2005 at 02:16 PM PST #

I'd like to migrate my storagemachine (currently Linux on amd64) to Sol10 and zfs-only; including mirroring there. Since I have a more-or-less-free amd64-machine running here, I'd offer you to test the boot-mechanism here on that machine if you'd like. I love to see Sol10 on zfs-only, especially for my data storage and I hope it will work quite soon!

Posted by Hanno 'Rince' Wagner on December 06, 2005 at 01:41 AM PST #

Don't have much to add, other than I'm thinking of deploying Solaris on a spare x86 fileserver to check out ZFS, so I'd love to see a bootable ZFS.

Tabriz, thanks for efforts & the blog ... I'm pretty sure we went to high school together (I was class of '93), as there can't be too many Tabriz Leman's out there. So I suppose I'm just posting to say hello - imagine my surprise to find an alumna as I read about ZFS.

Posted by John Hart on December 07, 2005 at 02:22 PM PST #

Is it possible to contribute the current status of your work to the OpenSolaris community either as patch or commit into the main CVS repository ? Maybe the help of others can speed up the work a lot...

Posted by Felix Schulte on December 08, 2005 at 08:33 PM PST #

Any updates about the schedule? I'm one of those who cannot wait to try it! :-)

Posted by Philippe Plouffe on January 10, 2006 at 09:38 PM PST #

Will ZFS boot work on the new macbook?

Posted by hip on February 08, 2006 at 07:32 PM PST #

An update would be great. I'm doing ZFS discussion with key customers next week during Solaris Day in Singapore. Cheers! e1, CSO Asia South.

Posted by Iwan Rahabok on February 16, 2006 at 01:20 AM PST #

I can't wait for ZFS boot on sparc!! In the meantime, how much of my system can I migrate to ZFS in the meantime? /usr? /opt? /var? Even just /usr would be a huge win for my setup here. Second question, how long until we can boot from a RAID-Z volume? It's only 500-some lines of code. :) Third question: What if I can't add? I'd never be able to post this. :-D

Posted by Brian Hechinger on April 18, 2006 at 06:40 PM PDT #

Is there a way to block that idiot?

Posted by Brian Hechinger on May 02, 2006 at 05:18 AM PDT #

I've been unable to see if there's been any progress on a full ZFS boot process since mid 2006 when the zfsboot using a ufs partition stuff came out, which works, but is still a bit clunky, or was when I was testing it back then around b42 or thereabouts. Any updates on zfs boot/grub stuff? This is the one thing I'm really really hanging out for with Solaris. For small server systems, booting ZFS will be *the* reason for me to switch back to Solaris after using NetBSD for years with raidframe.

Posted by Carl Brewer on December 11, 2006 at 06:57 PM PST #

still... no booting.. no time line...no luck? It's a bit disappointing more than 12 months of deafening silence

Posted by beaset on December 22, 2006 at 03:21 AM PST #

So what's the deal. Can we actually get an answer on some of this ZFS crap? What the hell. Can you use this filesystem for /usr /var /opt ? I just called Sun support and they just say: "you're on your own". Geez, it would have made Sun look more professional if they had all of this crap ironed out with the first release of Solaris 10. You'd think they were doing something revolutionary. Alpha HP tru64 Unix has had advfs for a looooonnnnggggg time. And guess what? YOu can use it for any filesystem you want, including / /usr /var I gotta say it's a big blunder on Sun's part not making ZFS fully functional in this way from the beginning.

Posted by crucible on January 05, 2007 at 06:49 PM PST #

@crucible: Sun's been working on ZFS in the most open of fashions ever in Sun's history, releasing it incrementally so people can test it, get to know it, and help advance using the Open Source model, and you're complaining that, because you got the product early, it's somewhat incomplete?

If so, you're an ungrateful ignoramus who isn't acquainted with "release early, release often".

Why don't YOU code support for your wishlist features then? ZFS is Open Source, you can do it. Otherwise, shut your trap.

Posted by Rudd-O on February 06, 2008 at 10:06 PM PST #

ZFSers:

I am interested to know where one would best be served to go to find out the status of bootable ZFS in terms of its availability (projected?) for Solaris 10.

I am not interested in joing a full force mailing list that is discussing every technical issue every day, just a place to go to find out when it is or will be placed into Solaris 10 (production), and to get a reasonable status update as to where it stands.

V/R,

Stuart

Posted by Stuart Blake Tener on May 06, 2008 at 12:22 PM PDT #

[Trackback] [...] an interesting post was made today on this site [...]...

Posted by Boot A Macbook Into Safe Mode ♦ Apple MacBook and MacBook Pro News on July 27, 2008 at 04:09 PM PDT #

Apparently Solaris 10 10/08, released today, contains bootable ZFS! Yay!

Posted by Atro on October 31, 2008 at 02:15 PM PDT #

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