ZFS root on MB Intel S3420GP

[Mikael Fridh]

On Sun, Apr 17, 2011 at 3:54 PM, George Kontostanos
<gkontos.mail at gmail.com> wrote:
> There is a nice guide in the WIKI regarding how to install your system with
> ZFS on root.
>
> http://wiki.freebsd.org/RootOnZFS/GPTZFSBoot/RAIDZ2

My recipe on the last few installs have been the [1]UFSBoot guide, but
instead I put /boot on a USB stick.
After installation I insert a second USB  stick and follow the
[2]handbook to configure a gmirror over 2 of them.

[1] http://wiki.freebsd.org/RootOnZFS/UFSBoot
[2] http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/geom-mirror.html

I make sure to:
newfs -L usbboot -b 65536 /dev/daXs1a

and use the ufs label in /etc/fstab:
tank    /       zfs     rw      0       0
/dev/ufs/usbboot        /bootdir        ufs     rw      0       0

This works very well so far and I can use 100% of my disk drives for
ZFS without wasting so much as a slice.
I'm not sure if there's any particular gotcha with this in the long
run... the usbs are pretty much read-only until I do another make
installkernel.

Now I've also converted to using ahci.ko after Jeremys tip.

I run releng_8_2 and
http://people.freebsd.org/~mm/patches/zfs/v28/releng-8.2-zfsv28-20110317.patch.xz
on all (4) machines so far.

--
Mikael