Dave Miner wrote: > Sarah Jelinek wrote: >> Hi Dave and All, >> >> Sorry for responding to my own email, but I was wrong about the >> preservation of data and the feature being complete in the current code. >>>>> >>>> >>>> If I didn't have a preservation capability, then what would I be >>>> able to do with the VTOC management? >>> >>> The thinking was we would be let the user create vtoc slices for use >>> in the rpool independent of what was currently on the disk. We >>> originally thought that we didn't have support for getting slice >>> data and maintaining state about preserving slice data in the >>> supporting libraries. We do have this functionality though, so being >>> able to preserve slice data should be doable and included in the >>> vtoc management. >>> >> >> We would need to make some changes to support an interactive >> installer. Most specifically, we need to provide support for passing >> back of slice data to the UI, and validating the user choices. So, >> it isn't free. We can do basic management of vtoc slices now, that is >> simply allow the user to create a vtoc slice without validation. We >> have to see if it makes any sense to do this partial feature first, >> then add the additional parts of the vtoc slice management. >> > > I wouldn't expect that to be acceptable - it's even less functional > than the partition management we currently have on x86.
The fdisk partition management for x86 essentially offers the equivalent of preservation for fdisk partitions though right? e.g. if there's an existing linux partition found, user can choose to leave it alone and not to touch it, etc. So of course anything less than slice preservation would be less functional than that. Without slice preservation, we'd still be providing some additional value vs. current UI behavior. Once a disk (or fdisk partition in x86) is selected, we could allow the user to slice out the disk, which specifies the size of the slice to be used for the root pool, as opposed to today where the entire disk would just be used. (e.g. for cases where its a 1TB disk, allowing user to specify that only 200Gig should be used for the slice to be the root pool seems potentially valuable. bug 9096 seems to want this, but I could see other value in being able to specify not to use an entire disk if users know they want to use the remaining space for some other purpose later.) thanks, -ethan
