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Date:      Mon, 11 Jul 2011 15:45:06 +0100
From:      Matt Burke <mattblists@icritical.com>
To:        Berczi Gabor <freebsd@berczi.be>
Cc:        freebsd-current@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: ZFS boot fails with two pools
Message-ID:  <4E1B0C72.7030109@icritical.com>
In-Reply-To: <12DA9EAC-8677-49AD-BA6C-5A155D2A6122@berczi.be>
References:  <12DA9EAC-8677-49AD-BA6C-5A155D2A6122@berczi.be>

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On 07/06/11 16:44, Berczi Gabor wrote:
> For some reason FreeBSD can't boot automatically:
...
> I have two pools, pool2 which is a mirrored zpool, and data being a
> raid-z pool. Note how the default should be "pool2:/boot/zfsloader". How
> can I fix this?

The following applies to 8-STABLE from 2011-06-29. I believe -CURRENT may
be identical, but don't know for certain.


>From what I could tell from researching my similar problem (*), you can
ignore the zpool bootfs property as well as the gpt bootme flag - they're
not looked at by the boot process, at least not before the stage 3 loader.

What happens is gptzfsboot simply tries to boot from the first zfs pool it
finds. The only control you have is that the first drive it scans is the
one it boots from.

If the BIOS booted from the disk with the raid-z pool, or if there is
something like a log partition for your raid-z pool before your boot pool
on the disk (fixed with my patch), then gptzfsboot will try to load
/boot/zfsloader from the raid-z pool, whether or not it can see enough
vdevs to actually use the pool. If it can't run zfsloader it'll pointlessly
try /boot/kernel/kernel from it before dumping you at the boot: prompt.
That is why you see the "Default" showing as it does - it's more "Last
tried" than "Default".

My advice is to double-check which drive your BIOS is booting from (make
sure it's one with 'pool2' on it), and if you've got a partition belonging
to your 'data' pool on the disk (log, cache, etc), you could try rebuilding
gptzfsboot with my patch providing you're aware that it's untested by
anyone other than myself and by using it you risk causing irreparable
damage to your pools. I hope not seeing as I'm running it myself, but I've
had no feedback on it.


(*) http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-fs/2011-June/011882.html


HTH,

Matt.




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