Re: EFI and zfs raid mirror partial fail (14.0 and RELENG_13)

On 12/1/2023 6:57 PM, Pete French wrote:
>
> On 01/12/2023 21:53, mike tancsa wrote:
>> Should have looked at open PRs. There is one from a while ago
>>
>> https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=258987
>>
>>
>
> Was thinking about this, and I was wondering if it would be possible 
> to make the EFI partition a gmirror. So its across all discs, mounted 
> only once, but would still boot from any of them. My understanding is 
> geom has the label at the end, yes ? So the firmware would see the 
> filesystem on a single partition quite happily ?
>
I view this issue in 2 parts-- a) the initial install and b) the 
maintenance going forward.  I think the a) part is more a clear cut bug 
than b).  b) I think is reasonable to be left up to the admin as part of 
the regular care and feeding of the server as to how they see fit.  But 
at install time,  especially with zfs, I think the (reasonable) 
assumption is all the necessary glue is done to make sure there is full 
redundancy on a boot mirror. If not, there should at least be a warning 
to tell the user that needs to be done.

Personally, I would not like the gmirror part as that adds a bit of 
complexity I dont want. But it certainly would be nice for some users.  
For now, I would vote against mounting the efi partition(s) by default 
as that breaks device redundancy and would like to see at least a 
warning from the installer that the efi parts are not yet setup on the 
other disks.

     ---Mike