Booting ZFS and GPT

[krad]

2009/9/22 Anselm Strauss <amsibamsi at gmail.com>

> My next question is: Is it actually the plan to use ZFS as official root
> filesystem in FreeBSD, eventually replacing UFS? Is ZFS actually designed
> for that use?
>
> Anselm
>
>
>
> On Sep 17, 2009, at 22:25 , krad wrote:
>
>  2009/9/17 Anselm Strauss <amsibamsi at gmail.com>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I've read and tried out that FreeBSD is able to boot from ZFS directly,
>> also with GPT partitions, through zfsboot and gptzfsboot. When I tried the
>> last time 8-CURRENT it was however not built into the release CD. Will this
>> be included in the final release image? Is there any plan to include GPT and
>> ZFS setup in sysinstall during an initial installation?
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Anselm
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>> To big a rewrite needed i think. I've heard of plans to potentially
>> release a graphical installer based on pc-bsd, which will do all the bells
>> an whistles. Not sure what stage its at though.
>>
>> The biggest thing we need for the release is for the loader to be compiled
>> with zfs support in. It seems to have been in and out over the past few
>> months so i try to make sure i have my own version specially compiled with
>> it in.
>>
>
>
I dont think there are any specific plans at present, as its not deemed
stable enough. Its also a complete resource hog compared to ufs, so for the
foreseeable future I can't see it happening.

One of the good things about freebsd is the range of hardware it supports.
If you made zfs the default option you would be making most hardware over a
few years old unusable without tinkering with the default options.

However  two or three years (ish)  when the average new purchase its a 16
core system with 16 GB ram, a few ssds and 10 TB of disk and the older
systems are the hi spec systems from today then there would be a good case
for it i guess.