Problems with zfsboot loader if raidz present on any drive

[Doug Rabson]

On 7 Dec 2008, at 03:19, Pegasus Mc Cleaft wrote:

> Hello Hackers,
>
> 	Recently and friend and I have been trying to get the new  
> gptzfsboot working
> on our machines and ran into a interesting problem.
>
> 	Initially I was building the world without the environment variable
> LOADER_ZFS_SUPPORT=YES in the /etc/make.conf and this, of course,  
> didnt work
> very well. Every time the machine booted, it would throw 2 lines  
> after the
> pin-wheel and then reboot. I couldent read what the lines were it  
> went so
> fast.
>
> 	My friend had a bit more luck and got his machine working OK with a  
> single
> drive and later a mirror drive added.
>
> 	I added the environment variable and rebuilt everything and  
> installed. This
> time, I could see the bios drives and a further 2 lines of ZFS  
> something and a
> reboot...
>
> 	No matter what I tried, I couldent get the machine to boot up to a  
> point
> where I could try and fix the problem, so I started pulling devices  
> out and
> found the following: If there is a raidz pool on any drive (not  
> necessarily
> the one that you are trying to boot from) the loader dies and  
> reboots the
> machine. My friend, as an experiment created 3 gpt partitions (in  
> addition to
> the single partition that he had been previously booted from) on his  
> single
> drive and made a raidz pool for testing. His machine showed the same  
> condition
> as mine, however he was able to capture the message before the machine
> rebooted:
>
> <message>
> ZFS: can only boot from disk or mirror vdevs
>
> ZFS: inconsistent nvlist contents

The zfsboot code in current doesn't support raidz or raidz2. I have  
been working on adding that support but its not ready yet. The code  
works in my test harness but crashes instantly when I put it in the  
boot code :(. I should have time to finish debugging it soon.