[OpenIndiana-discuss] Moving /var and/or /usr to own zfs filesystem

[Ben Taylor]

I really can't see the wisdom of splitting out /usr from / on a ZFS file
system.  I had an open bug with Sun in 2009 regarding the separate /var
partition, and we went months arguing with support regarding whether or not
that was a supported configuration.

The main issue was that single user and failsafe modes were not mounting
/var, which made problems with the system difficult to debug when requiring
single user mode or failsafe mode.   The obvious argument for this config
was that logfiles are in /var, so /var being available in single user or
failsafe was really required for debugging.  Since mounting /var in
failsafe or single-user required me to changes the ZFS config, it also
created complications if I didn't reset the /var ZFS config.

Eventually, support finally relented, and the bug was fixed.

My point being is that, a separate /usr ZFS file system has had no support
or testing for this type of configuration.

Ben


On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 8:07 PM, Jim Klimov <jimklimov at cos.ru> wrote:

> On 2013-09-05 01:33, Christopher X. Candreva wrote:
>
>> As far as I remember I split if off by hand myself, after installing. The
>> thing is, it doesn't work on the new mahcine I'm trying that on.
>>
>> However, you may have just convinced me NOT to. I have to admit, I'm
>> essentially comming from Solaris 8 (I've run some 10 machines, but not
>> used
>> zfs extensives and haven't used Zones at all). However I think I finally
>> understand what boot environments do, why the filesystems are
>> consolidated, and what package management has to do with it.
>>
>
> Well, these things all have their reasoning, at least for the default
> case, even if I personally disagree and tweak my setups differently ;)
>
>
>  Can zones be easily copied to other machines, like VM images ?
>>
>
> Pretty much yes, as long as the global zone OS version is the same on
> both machines (there are many kernel-libc-zfs-... interactions that
> do require coherent versions to be running). Easiness of such porting
> depends on complexity of your customizations - such as delegated ZFS
> into the zones vs. also storing them as singular filesystems, network
> setup (delegated VNICs probably most common today). But in short - it
> works after a little massage :)
>
> //Jim
>
>
>
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