ZFS Progress in FreeBSD

I've been watching the progress of my favorite filesystem, ZFS, in FreeBSD for a while now. ZFS v28 has been under test by the members of the freebsd-fs mailing list, and I have read multiple resources that have indicated that the performance of the ZFS implementation in FreeBSD is much better than in OpenSolaris; indeed, my Nexenta box only supports up to ZFS v26.

And now, ZFS v28 is now in FreeBSD-CURRENT:
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-fs/2011-February/010799.html

There is an excellent article in BSD magazine with some general information. The article is by Martin Matuška, who maintains a ZFS v28 patchset against FreeBSD-STABLE.

When I have some time, I'll be excited to migrate to FreeBSD, and to get away from the insanity that is (was) OpenSolaris.

Moving ZFS root filesystem from one computer to another

A few weeks ago, I decided to move the drives in my OpenSolaris (NexentaCP 1.0.1) box from one computer into another computer with slightly different hardware. The old machine used an Intel ICH6 SATA controller; the new box uses an inexpensive SIL3124-based four-port PCI controller card.

GRUB seemed to load fine, and was able to find and load the kernel (unix) and boot_archive files. However, Nexenta didn't boot: the kernel flashed an error message and immediately rebooted the system. After I added the -kv kernel debug option in GRUB, I was able to read the error message:

panic: cannot mount root path /ramdisk:a

After a great deal of effort, I finally figured out the solution. The problem was that the zpool.cache file inside of boot_archive was telling the Solaris kernel to look for the root filesystem at the wrong place. Booting from the Nexenta CD in rescue mode, mounting the root filesystem, and executing bootadm update-archive -R wasn't enough, because the zpool.cache file was never refreshed.

The solution, kind reader: if you move your ZFS root filesystem from one box to another, boot a Solaris "rescue" cd (I just use the NexentaCP 1.0.1 install CD), import your root filesystem, and manually freshen the zpool.cache file. Then update your boot archive using bootadm. On Nexenta, the root filesystem is labeled <<syspool/rootfs-nmu-XXX>>, where XXX corresponds to an apt-cloned version of the root filesystem. Here are the steps that I used, once I booted into the Nexenta installer and pressed the F3 key for the shell:

# mkdir /tmp/mnt

# zpool import -f syspool

# mount -F zfs syspool/rootfs-nmu-002 /tmp/mnt

# cp /etc/zfs/zpool.cache /tmp/mnt/etc/zfs/zpool.cache

# bootadm update-archive -R /tmp/mnt

Creating boot_archive for /tmp/mnt
updating /tmp/mnt/platform/i86pc/boot_archive

# umount /tmp/mnt

# reboot

... and... voila! system works again.

I've also noticed that NexentaCP 2 doesn't seem to want to boot if I have a SIL3124 card installed in the machine; this looks like a more recent bug in the latest OpenSolaris; however, NexentaCP 1.0.1 works just fine with the card.

Quick Notes on Enabling Samba in OpenSolaris

I've been experimenting with OpenSolaris again. I figured out how to enable my broken samba package: I discovered that, after installing the package with

pfexec pkg install SUNWsmbs SUNWsmba

I had to execute:

svccfg import /var/svc/manifest/network/samba.xml

I then copied /etc/sfw/smb.conf-example and modified appropriate values, and created a configuration file that was saved to:

/etc/sfw/smb.conf

Finally, I could enable the SAMBA server:

svcadm enable samba