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OpenSolaris Boot Support For ZFS Root FS on x86 and SPARC

Posted by timothy on from the devilish-wings-spread-wider dept.

Derkjan de Haan writes "I am glad to see progress is being made on the the ability of OpenSolaris to boot from a ZFS filesystem: 'This putback provides the ability to boot the Solaris Operating System from a ZFS root file system on both x86 and SPARC platforms. Full ZFS boot and install support will be available in a subsequent build. Because of the phased putback, we recommend waiting for the full boot and install support rather than attempting to use the ZFS boot features separately.'"

50 comments

  1. Am I missing something? by TheRaven64 · · Score: 3, Informative

    This is an article about System V UNIX, and it's in the BSD category and tagged bsd. WTF?

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    1. Re:Am I missing something? by ozamosi · · Score: 2, Funny

      I don't understand your problem. It is not about Linux, but one of those Linux clones. BSD, Solaris, that's just marketing anyway...

      ...right?

    2. Re:Am I missing something? by tripwirecc · · Score: 1

      Solaris has some roots in BSD, so it's not wrong.

    3. Re:Am I missing something? by nevali · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Given that it doesn't state OpenSolaris in the title, I clicked through to this hoping that support had been added to one of the BSDs.

      OpenSolaris finally being able to boot from ZFS is cool, but⦠has dick-all to do with BSD :\

    4. Re:Am I missing something? by JamesTRexx · · Score: 3, Funny

      I hope you've got asbestos underwear, calling BSD and Solaris Linux clones. :-)

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    5. Re:Am I missing something? by maeltor · · Score: 1

      Um...what?

    6. Re:Am I missing something? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      BSD and Solaris are both older than Linux, and completely different.

    7. Re:Am I missing something? by yomegaman · · Score: 2, Informative

      You're thinking of the original SunOS. Solaris is SVR4.

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      ...wearing a skin-tight topless leather jumpsuit, with cutaway buttocks and transparent crotch panel.
    8. Re:Am I missing something? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Your mom's older than Linux.

    9. Re:Am I missing something? by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1

      Wow, the mods in the BSD section really don't have a sense of humour. Must be all of the BSD is dying trolls.

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    10. Re:Am I missing something? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Kind of. The Solaris OE refers to all elements that make up the overall environment. It is still based on SunOS and in fact states that when booting (Solaris 8,9 and 10 boot as "SunOS 5.8", "SunOS 5.9", "SunOS 5.10").

      It's a silly argument, but the BSD roots are still there - I think the ucb (/usr/bin/ucb or something like that) still exists. UCB == "University California, Berkeley".

    11. Re:Am I missing something? by aliquis · · Score: 1

      It's about ZFS, not only Solaris. And ZFS are ported to FreeBSD and OS X.

    12. Re:Am I missing something? by RiotingPacifist · · Score: 1

      zombies dont laugh ?

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    13. Re:Am I missing something? by ozamosi · · Score: 1

      Think of my post as aid for their anger management therapy ;)

    14. Re:Am I missing something? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's a silly argument, but the BSD roots are still there - I think the ucb (/usr/bin/ucb or something like that) still exists.
      And not included in PATH by default. And I'm pretty sure that the manuals describe /usr/ucb as "legacy", and that some of it are shell scripts that wrap the SysV stuff.
    15. Re:Am I missing something? by BrainInAJar · · Score: 1

      and /usr/ucb is quite broken. ps(1) works, but not much else

    16. Re:Am I missing something? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm older than linux

    17. Re:Am I missing something? by filipl · · Score: 1

      broken? i prefer it over ps(1) and use it outside of any wrapping scripts. moreover, ps(1b) and ps(1) are the same binary.

  2. Honk! Honk! by tripwirecc · · Score: 5, Informative

    The OpenSolaris distribution can already install ZFS root and boot, based on the previous putback. This current putback makes it more robust, especially when it comes to finding the root device after having been swapped to a different port. What's still missing is multidisk pool and RAID-Z boot support.

  3. WTF is putback ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Seriously. What ?

    1. Re:WTF is putback ? by d3vi1 · · Score: 4, Informative

      Sort of a checkin in Sun terms.

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      UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever ones.
    2. Re:WTF is putback ? by TheGratefulNet · · Score: 4, Informative

      ob disc: I work at sun

      a 'putback' is just a formal way to submit your updated source code to a source code control system (what is called a 'gate').

      and in fact, the matching command is (yes, you guessed it) 'bringover'. seriously, it is.

      --

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    3. Re:WTF is putback ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      What do they call a quarter pounder at Sun? A burgerpoundquarter?

      Big Mac's a Big Mac, but they call it JBigMac.

    4. Re:WTF is putback ? by OldManAndTheC++ · · Score: 2, Funny

      What do they call a quarter pounder at Sun? Solaris with Cheese.
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  4. Booting isn't so interesting by bhima · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I don't think booting from ZFS is all that interesting. I think expanding a RAID-Z pool is far more interesting: http://blogs.sun.com/ahl/entry/expand_o_matic_raid_z

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    1. Re:Booting isn't so interesting by TheRaven64 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The reason booting is important is twofold. First, it means that you can simplify your configuration by having all of all of your disks managed by the ZFS storage pool manager. Secondly, it means that you get all of the nice transactional features from ZFS on your boot partition. If you upgrade your kernel or some modules to a broken one (for example) then you can easily restore to a previous snapshot at the next boot.

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    2. Re:Booting isn't so interesting by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Expanding the pool etc. is MORE interesting, you're right. But, being able to boot from and install to ZFS is interesting as well to me. It's pretty common to have separate data and OS disks*. But, for the use *I'd* put ZFS to, I'd be using it on some home systems (where it's overkill, but why not...) I don't have cleanly separated OS and data disks, so being able to just make the whole mess ZFS would be nice.

                *For the "small" servers like the old HP/Compaq Netservers and the like, why do they have these relatively convoluted hot-pluggable RAID setups, and a single-point-of-failure boot hard disk?

    3. Re:Booting isn't so interesting by NateTech · · Score: 1

      Yawn. People willing to pay for Veritas File System have been able to do this for 10 years on the Solaris platform.

      While I like ZFS, it's really not all that "NEW". It's just a re-implementation of things available commercially.

      That makes it inexpensive, which is good for many -- but critical systems have been doing this kind of disk management for a very long time now.

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  5. [ot] *BSD is Dying by wild_berry · · Score: 1

    SunOS and subsequently Solaris, as inherited in OpenSolaris, the subject of this article, are AT&T UNIX System V derivatives, not from the Berkely Software Distribution (BSD) of UNIX. You're offtopic, my dear.

    1. Re:[ot] *BSD is Dying by jgrahn · · Score: 1

      SunOS and subsequently Solaris, as inherited in OpenSolaris, the subject of this article, are AT&T UNIX System V derivatives, not from the Berkely Software Distribution (BSD) of UNIX.

      SunOS was BSD. Solaris is AT&T. See Wikipedia or something for the details of Sun's confusing naming and numbering scheme.

  6. Who cares about BSD... by Marcion · · Score: 2, Interesting

    ... when does Linux get ZFS?

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    1. Re:Who cares about BSD... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      Never, it is CDDL, and Linus won't have that in his baby.

    2. Re:Who cares about BSD... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ... when does Linux get ZFS? When CDDL and GPL become compatible.

      In short, never.
    3. Re:Who cares about BSD... by TheRaven64 · · Score: 4, Informative
      First, in spite of the section, this article has nothing to do with BSD - it is about Solaris, which is a System V derivative. FreeBSD also has ZFS support, but does not have more than very limited support for ZFS booting (and none in the stable release, I believe).

      As to when Linux will get support for ZFS, it requires one of two things to happen. Either Linux developers need to do a clean-room reimplementation of ZFS, or they need to modify their license to one that isn't incompatible with many other Free Software licenses , including the CDDL.

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    4. Re:Who cares about BSD... by lakeland · · Score: 1

      You missed the most likely option...

      Or Linux needs to get user mode filesystems up to the point you can store your mission-critical data on them.

      ZFS has been written ported to linux, I tried it last year but one of my tests was to pull power to the drive while it was mounted (but not doing anything) I lost all data on the drive beyond (easy) recovery. My conclusion, it isn't ready for use on a Linux server yet.

    5. Re:Who cares about BSD... by aliquis · · Score: 2, Interesting

      http://zfs-on-fuse.blogspot.com/

      Except on fuse either when Sun goes GPL 2, or when both Sun and Linux goes GPL 3, or if Linux stop being GPL at all but uhm, yeah right ..

    6. Re:Who cares about BSD... by zonker · · Score: 0

      Who cares about Linux... Considering the licensing issues...

      When does OS X get boot support (it already has ZFS support just not via the GUI)?

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    7. Re:Who cares about BSD... by Solra+Bizna · · Score: 1

      FUSE is quite stable. It's ZFS FUSE that's unstable.

      -:sigma.SB

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    8. Re:Who cares about BSD... by RiotingPacifist · · Score: 0

      It requires some rouge kernel hackers that dont care about licensing, you know the kind the drive round on motor bikes, and break into Steve Ballmers office and upload from his desktop, not because they're too cheap to pay for an internet connection, but simply because they wanted chairs to patch up the holes in their pirate ship that's waiting of the cost.

      Yup the day we get those sort of rouge kernel hackers well get zfs in linux, but until then due to suns choice of license its not going to happen any sooner.

      --
      IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
    9. Re:Who cares about BSD... by cptnapalm · · Score: 1, Funny

      "It requires some rouge kernel hackers that dont care about licensing"

      Unfortunately, Linux kernel hackers are mostly license conscious. I also hear that they are mostly azure, like the Smurfs.

    10. Re:Who cares about BSD... by lakeland · · Score: 1

      I can believe that, though I haven't tested FUSE for much other than ZFS (just mythtvfs and sshfs and both for fun at home rather than production use). I also believe the ZFS code is stable and not prone to corrupting drives when power is lost.

      The problem is the current linux implmenetation of ZFS-FUSE.

    11. Re:Who cares about BSD... by SimonTheSoundMan · · Score: 1

      You know we wont know 'til the day Steve Jobs announces it. I'm guessing it will be a while.

    12. Re:Who cares about BSD... by hedwards · · Score: 1

      This is one of my main criticisms of the GPL, the licensing is overly strict. It just makes no sense whatsoever to have to rewrite things which have source available under an open source license just because it has to be GPL. Writing that into the license itself is just a nice way of saying sod off to projects that use other licenses. Apart from that, it could have its own home in the source and just be linked in where necessary. Depending upon the license, it isn't necessarily even going to change anything about business as usual.

      Rewrites and reverse engineering really ought to be reserved for times when the owner of the code isn't willing to allow access to the code.

      I'm pretty sure that ZFS is sufficiently cool that somebody will reverse engineer it and rewrite it, but it will take extra time and effort to do so.

    13. Re:Who cares about BSD... by DurendalMac · · Score: 1

      I'm guessing it'll be 10.6 before it becomes official. Apple will let it hit the wild and see if there are any issues. I don't think they'll roll that out in a 10.5.x update. It'll be a big feature announcement when Steve demos 10.6 for the first time.

    14. Re:Who cares about BSD... by swordgeek · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Whenever the Linux zealots feel like putting down the "one-True-Holy-license" pitchforks and start to implement it.

      The code is out there. You're welcome to use it following the license under which it was released.

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    15. Re:Who cares about BSD... by JohnFluxx · · Score: 1

      If the CDDL and GPL were compatible, then Sun would have chosen a different license that was incompatible with the GPL.

    16. Re:Who cares about BSD... by JohnFluxx · · Score: 1

      Um, what? It is not possible to put the zfs code into the kernel. It would be illegal to do so. Putting down pitchforks would not solve this problem.

    17. Re:Who cares about BSD... by truthful+cynic · · Score: 1

      ergo, when penguins fly? :)

    18. Re:Who cares about BSD... by filipl · · Score: 1

      who is dying now ... :)