From owner-freebsd-fs@FreeBSD.ORG  Fri May 18 10:32:30 2007
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Date: Fri, 18 May 2007 10:32:30 +0000
From: Darren Reed <darrenr@freebsd.org>
To: Dag-Erling Sm??rgrav <des@des.no>
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Cc: freebsd-fs@freebsd.org, freebsd-current@freebsd.org,
	Pawel Jakub Dawidek <pjd@freebsd.org>, Joao Barros <joao.barros@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: ZFS: amd64, devd, root file system.
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On Thu, May 17, 2007 at 06:39:58PM +0200, Dag-Erling Sm??rgrav wrote:
> Darren Reed <darrenr@freebsd.org> writes:
> > Dag-Erling Sm??rgrav <des@des.no> writes:
> > > 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 "@sun.com"?
> 
> No, but ZFS comes from Sun, and Solaris is the only OS that can
> currently boot from ZFS; therefore the comparison is germane.

Solaris uses grub to boot from ZFS...I don't know how difficult that
work was, but ZFS root can't be done with the old-style boot+loader
on either sparc/x86.  There may be implications in that for FreeBSD
too.

> My point is that it is a lot more difficult for us to implement ZFS
> support in an OS that is intended to run on everything and the kitchen
> sink, from the crappiest 486 to the latest quad-core Xeon, with all
> kinds of crappy disk controllers, than it is for Sun to do the same in
> Solaris, which mostly runs on hardware designed and manufactured by Sun
> for the specific purpose of running Solaris.

Which is why I'm using FreeBSD+ZFS rather than Solaris+ZFS :-)

Maybe more layers are required in FreeBSD disk I/O subsystem to
shield things like ZFS from crappy controllers?

Darren