Re: ZFS: amd64, devd, root file system.

On Mon, May 14, 2007 at 09:22:31AM +0200, Dag-Erling Sm??rgrav wrote:
> Darren Reed <darrenr_at_hub.freebsd.org> writes:
> > It is not a lot of fun having to support the kernel and 'some'
> > filesystems being of a different type of filesystem to other parts
> > (from a system admin perspective.)  This is especially true of those
> > filesystems that make up the "root".
> 
> I don't see what the problem is.  I am perfectly content with having my
> root file system on UFS2 on a pair of mirror disks.

Then your experience doing systems administration has been a lot...
cleaner and easier than what mine has.  These days it is uncommon
to run out of space on / because disks are generally so damn big.

But if it does happen, the only choice you have with a filesystem
such as UFS is to clean up files or repartition your disk.

But your UFS2 mirror won't provide you with CRC corrected data, so
if your PCI card decided to flip a bit or two while sending data out
to disk, you've got no way of knowing about it.  The data reliability
and assurance of correctness delivered via ZFS simply isn't available
with UFS2.  Now maybe *you* don't care about that now, but someday,
someone might when part of their kernel (or LKM) gets corrupted and
they have no way of knowing.

> Considering the amount of work which would be required to allow FreeBSD
> to boot from ZFS (which you apparently do not appreciate), I perfectly
> understand Pawel's choice.

If you think I don't appreciate the work involved then I'll say that
you apparently have no appreciation of how using a single filesystem
and being able to use the likes of ZFS for root simplifies system admin.

> Remember that unlike Sun, we do not make the hardware our OS runs on,
> nor do we write the firmware for it.

Do you see my email address as being "_at_sun.com"?

No.

My comments have got *nothing* to do with what Sun does and have got
everything to do with having worked on multiple different Unix platforms
and having worked on systems where there were different constraints on
what could be done with managing root because it was a different file-
system type.

I really don't understand why you needed to be so inflamatory with
your email, but then again your response was all about you and what
you do, not about what others do or would benefit them.  I personally
don't want or need ZFS as a root right now, but I can see that some
might and that it could be of benefit to me in the future.

Darren