Problems with zfsboot loader if raidz present on any drive

[Pegasus Mc Cleaft]

On Sunday 07 December 2008 09:22:16 Doug Rabson wrote:
> 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.

Hi Doug,

	In my haste to put a message to the group, I didnt do a very good job of 
explaining or give what platform I was working with. 

	I set up a single disk pool with the gptzfsboot code on it as a boot drive. 
My idea was to have a single disk boot (and after it boots and I can kill the 
UFS drive I am currently booting from) convert it to a mirror. But I have 6 
other drives in the machine that I have as a raidz for my /usr/home, et al. 

	If the 6 raidz drives are present at boot time, the machine starts to cyclic 
reboot just after the pin-wheel. 

	The machine I am working on is running FBSD8.0-Current as of midnight 
7/12/2008 and the platform is AMD64. 

	If I can help test in any way I would be more than happy to try, or provide 
any information necessary.. 

~Peg