As announced before, ZFS v15 was successfuly imported into FreeBSD! For a time there was an option of importing just v15 or proceeding directly to v16 but the community has decided to first import the older version for reasons of stability and compatibility with Solaris 10 Update 8.
Category Archives: ZFS
Florent Thoumie » FreeBSD 2010-06-25 09:01:01
I had a nice surprise reading my Facebook timeline this morning: Matt Olander announcing that Warner Losh committed the PC-BSD installer backend to the FreeBSD SVN repository.
I didn’t know anything about it before BSDCan this year, so here’s a quick summary of what I remember (and is of interest, to me at least):
- Can install either PC-BSD or vanilla FreeBSD
- Supports ZFS and GELI partitions
- The backend is all shell and quite easy to read/modify to suit your needs
- There are at least two frontends: a QT one (default for PC-BSD) and a dialog/curses (not quite sure, fairly recent in any case) one that looks like it would be a good drop-in replacement for sysinstall.
- It supports a configuration file that isn’t dissimilar to the one you can use with sysinstall at the moment: the frontend actually only generates a config file and the backend does the job without intervention.
So really, how is that for morning awesomeness?
Help test ZFS v15
The most recently ported ZFS version in HEAD and 8-stable (which includes 8.1) is 14, and now a call for testers was issued for v15. This new version brings in user and group quotas and there is a hint toward importing the latest ZFS version.
A good thing about this patch / CFT is that ready-made minimal ISO images are provided for potential testers, which can be used to install new systems on real or virtual machines. Very convenient!
Help test ZFS v15
The most recently ported ZFS version in HEAD and 8-stable (which includes 8.1) is 14, and now a call for testers was issued for v15. This new version brings in user and group quotas and there is a hint toward importing the latest ZFS version.
A good thing about this patch / CFT is that ready-made minimal ISO images are provided for potential testers, which can be used to install new systems on real or virtual machines. Very convenient!
Nicer things in life – VMWare 4, ZFS, virtual hot-plugs
Sometimes, when things go right, they are really beautiful to watch. Like adding a virtual (SCSI) drive to a running virtual machine freshly copied from ESXi 3.5 to vSphere 4, seeing that drive simply appear in the guest system in a hot-plug fashion, creating a ZFS pool on it and watching iostat as data is migrated from the old drive which has gotten to be too small (and uses UFS), to the new one on which the magic of ZFS will allow the file system to grow indefinitely (as the damn application is greedy in a stupid way), and seeing that "pausing" problems ZFS caused on ESXi 3.5 really are solved in 4.
VMWare + FreeBSD + ZFS soft-raid with SATA drives – performance
VMWare ESXi is a great free-as-in-beer product bringing professional virtualization within everyone's grasp. Contrasted to VMWare Server 2, I'm yet to find something really serious in ESXi, to rant about, but the lack of software RAID support comes very near. For some strange reason ESXi doesn't support software RAID configurations (officially it's all about "reliability" but I suspect they're either not interested in building management products for sw RAID into the various management "consoles", because sw RAID appears to be at the low end of the market or it's something to do with the ESX's dubious interaction with the GPL).
ZFS !experimental
By the judgement of developers, ZFS is no longer considered experimental in FreeBSD :)