From owner-freebsd-fs@FreeBSD.ORG Tue Apr 29 01:52:56 2008 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-fs@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4C8EE106564A for ; Tue, 29 Apr 2008 01:52:56 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from andrew@thefrog.net) Received: from ug-out-1314.google.com (ug-out-1314.google.com [66.249.92.175]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id B81DD8FC15 for ; Tue, 29 Apr 2008 01:52:55 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from andrew@thefrog.net) Received: by ug-out-1314.google.com with SMTP id y2so951853uge.37 for ; Mon, 28 Apr 2008 18:52:54 -0700 (PDT) Received: by 10.67.30.3 with SMTP id h3mr5654698ugj.35.1209432441311; Mon, 28 Apr 2008 18:27:21 -0700 (PDT) Received: by 10.86.36.4 with HTTP; Mon, 28 Apr 2008 18:27:21 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: <16a6ef710804281827p4b6e1ef3sbec516163ba764a@mail.gmail.com> Date: Tue, 29 Apr 2008 11:27:21 +1000 From: "Andrew Hill" Sender: andrew@thefrog.net To: freebsd-fs@freebsd.org MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Google-Sender-Auth: 9c73f03254ec42d2 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline X-Content-Filtered-By: Mailman/MimeDel 2.1.5 Subject: ZFS docs / info X-BeenThere: freebsd-fs@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Filesystems List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Tue, 29 Apr 2008 01:52:56 -0000 Not sure if this is the right list for this (apologies if not) but here goes... Over the last week I've spent a lot of time getting to know ZFS; starting with basically no knowledge of how the bits and pieces are structured, nor how to use it, and (with a lot of late nights) getting to the point where I feel comfortable using it for a ~2TB raidz server. I've been using FreeBSD for about 8 years, so I'm comfortable using the system, my learning curve was purely with zfs. So at the suggestion of a friend I made a bunch of notes and wrote an intro to zfs as I now see it, and made some specific notes on things that I didn't find obvious from the documentation (at least the docs I found... which were the ZFS Tuning Guide on wiki.freebsd.org, the sun ZFS administrator's guide, zfs/zpool man pages and a bunch of blogs). Mostly the structure of the differnet elements of ZFS (zpools, file systems, vdevs, zvols) and how they interact, but also a few limitations of how those can be configured. I figure what I've written may be (hopefully) useful to others with UNIX experience but brand new to ZFS, or, better still, if someone is writing a wiki or documentation for ZFS on bsd, i'm happy for any of what i've written to be used for that kind of thing. post 1 - basic intro, overview of the structure of zfs (zpools, zfs, vdevs, zvols and how they all interact) http://blog.thefrog.net/2008/04/zfs-on-freebsd.html post 2 - some notable limitations and features i didn't really get from my reading of the docs (and a bug that i've yet to reproduce in a debug kernel) http://blog.thefrog.net/2008/04/more-zfs-on-freebsd.html i'm providing links because there's a rather large amount of text, which will no doubt have the odd mistake to fix as they're pointed out to me anyway, hope it helps someone