Date: Wed, 28 Jul 2010 23:02:57 +0200 From: Marius Strobl <marius@alchemy.franken.de> To: John Baldwin <jhb@freebsd.org> Cc: freebsd-sparc64@freebsd.org Subject: Re: ZFS root partition Message-ID: <20100728210257.GB10197@alchemy.franken.de> In-Reply-To: <201007270945.32010.jhb@freebsd.org> References: <AANLkTimnM=taU4rNuX51cAiLjWkC1zKNgLYH0xgSRoHB@mail.gmail.com> <201007270945.32010.jhb@freebsd.org>
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On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 09:45:31AM -0400, John Baldwin wrote: > On Tuesday, July 27, 2010 4:40:48 am Rob Farmer wrote: > > Is is possible to have a ZFS root with sparc64? I've used one of the > > guides on the wiki, http://wiki.freebsd.org/RootOnZFS/GPTZFSBoot, on > > amd64 and it worked fine, but that doesn't seem to apply, since the > > /boot/pmbr and /boot/gptzfsboot files don't exist on sparc64. > > Booting from a GPT isn't supported for OpenFirmware, so it doesn't work for > sparc64. > Looking at the description of the ZFS on-disk format it should be possible to implement something similar with the VTOC scheme though; the first-stage loader (8K max., we have no zero-stage on sparc64) probably should jump to something like a 1.5-stage loader located in the 3.5MB boot block area located after the ZFS uberblock and would need to know how to read ZFS in order to finally load /boot/loader. I haven't looked at how the GPT variant works in detail but I suspect most of the ZFS-specific actually could be recycled. The other missing part would be to teach some part (maybe GEOM_PART) how to write something to the ZFS boot block area. Any takers? :) Marius
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