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Date:      Mon, 18 Apr 2011 08:54:07 +0200
From:      Pawel Tyll <ptyll@nitronet.pl>
To:        Daniel Kalchev <daniel@digsys.bg>
Cc:        freebsd-stable@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: ZFS root on MB Intel S3420GP
Message-ID:  <249960131.20110418085407@nitronet.pl>
In-Reply-To: <4DABDB31.90301@digsys.bg>
References:  <20110417123232.GA96423@laa.zp.ua> <20110417142135.GA51568@icarus.home.lan> <20110417163135.GC96423@laa.zp.ua> <20110417183014.GA55444@icarus.home.lan> <20110417184538.GG96423@laa.zp.ua> <20110417185402.GA55984@icarus.home.lan> <4DABDB31.90301@digsys.bg>

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Daniel Kalchev wrote:

> The only real trouble with USB stisks is that some motherboards
> behave unpredictable as to boot order, but this is improving.
Why would you care about that?
When running mirrored setups with ZFS on root, I'm using GPT scheme
and every drive has boot partition, swap partition mirrored by gmirror
and ZFS partition:

=3D>       34  625142381  ada0  GPT  (298G)
         34        990        - free -  (495K)
       1024        128     1  freebsd-boot  (64K)
       1152   16777216     2  freebsd-swap  (8.0G)
   16778368  608364047     3  freebsd-zfs  (290G)

Didn't check swap-on-ZFS progress lately and when I did check
it, it ended in panics.

Unless by boot order you mean that it randomly tries to boot from
something different than USB stick, then I suppose this could pose a
problem or two :)

> My recent "install procedure" never used the FreeBSD release media.=20
> Instead, I have created myself USB stick distribution media (can work=20
> with CD/DVD as well, or over diskless boot), using a procedure like this:
mfsbsd by Martin Matu=9Aka does the job well, and its simple and
efficient, net-boot friendly.

> Jeremy, one of the reasons I switched many systems to "pure ZFS" was
> related to the memory allocation troubles between USF and ZFS we=20
> observed for quite long time. Having pure ZFS system eliminates these=20
> issues completely. I do have still few mixed systems - only laziness and
> lack of (down)time prevented me from switching these to pure-ZFS too. My
> rationale is that if something breaks, it is likely it will break with
> or without ZFS on root. In either case, I would have to load FreeBSD=20
> from other media. So it does not matter from where you boot the system.
I switched to ZFS on root pretty much when it was for brave and/or
stupid. Since about 8.1 I haven't ran into single problem caused by
this and with added benefits, it's no-brainer for new setups today.
While one would argue that it isn't always needed, I would argue that
data integrity is always needed everywhere ;)





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