[OpenIndiana-discuss] sd.conf trouble and illumos bug #3220

[Bryan N Iotti]

Hi Reginald,

Thanks for your reply.

In the end, I just booted from a live DVD and plugged that drive in on my laptop using a double asterisk as the sd.conf line and an 8k block size. A test pool create read back ashift=13, which should be fine.

Then I used format -e and fdisk to create a single Solaris slice with start and end blocks that would fall on a cylinder number that was divisible by 8 (I did it like for 4K disks, if I'm wrong I'd like some input on that please).

Then I created the rpool in the first slice and moved the disk over to the final system, where I sent and received the zfs datasets. Change menu.lst, install grub and I was done. Working fine so far (160MB/sec sustained on a scrub, normal wsvc_time and asvc_time in iostat).

Would anyone see any problem in doing the sd.conf line backwards, I mean masking all drives as "**" with a 4K blocksize and adding entries for the other 512-byte drives? What would happen if ZFS thought a 512-byte block device used a 4K block size? Wasted space, performance issue, errors?

Thanks, as always, for any and all input.


   Bryan


On Sun, 5 Jan 2014 16:10:58 -0800 (PST)
Reginald Beardsley <pulaskite at yahoo.com> wrote:

> I can't comment on your particular issue which is why I didn't respond earlier.  However,  I had trouble getting a 3 TB Toshiba USB drive to work properly.  I spent a bunch of time reading the code that parses sd.conf, but finally gave up and didn't go further.
> 
> On reflection I wonder if the problem is a failure to propagate the information about block size to ZFS correctly under certain circumstances.  I think it would be nice if one could force ashift when creating a pool.  Automagic is nice, but there's often no substitute for human intelligence.  I spent a couple of days trying to persuade OI to create a properly aligned pool before I gave up.
> 
> 
>  
> 
> _______________________________________________
> OpenIndiana-discuss mailing list
> OpenIndiana-discuss at openindiana.org
> http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss
> 


-- 
Bryan N Iotti

+39 366 3708436
ironsides.medvet at runbox.com