One of the project ideas on the open ZFS site is to create images: http://open-zfs.org/wiki/Projects#Virtual_machine_images_with_OpenZFS
Yesterday, I made a preliminary amd64 Gentoo Linux on ZFS VM image that uses a 4GB guest pool. It could be considered the first step toward that. This image is really only meant for development, but it is possible to use it to deploy virtual machines for production purposes and if I anyone is interested, I could provide documentation on how to do that. Now that I have an image that I could give to people, the main question on my mind is how to give it to them. If I strip out the sources, I should be able to get the compressed image down to a few hundred megabytes, but the image would still be fairly large and I would prefer to include the sources to simplify GPL compliance. That should leave me with >1GB file after compression. Uploading gigabyte VM images to Gentoo's servers would likely make the Gentoo Infrastructure team unhappy, so it would be preferable to host such large files outside the Gentoo project. Does anyone have any thoughts where ZFS VM images could live? Would Hybrid Cluster be okay with putting them on the Open ZFS site? By the way, I envision people using this image to test changes by doing something like this: 1. Boot the VM (here shown to be on a zvol) sudo chown $USER /dev/zvol/rpool/KVM/gentoo qemu-system-x86_64 -drive file=/dev/zvol/rpool/KVM/gentoo,if=virtio 2. Log into the gentoo user (password gentoo). Make changes to the repository in ~/zfs (or ~/spl) and commit them. 3. Run these commands in a root shell (also password gentoo): genkernel all --no-clean --no-mountboot --zfs --bootloader=grub2 --callback="emerge --oneshot @module-rebuild" kexec -l /boot/kernel-genkernel-x86_64-3.10.7-gentoo-r1 --initrd=/boot/initramfs-genkernel-x86_64-3.10.7-gentoo-r1 --append='root=ZFS=tank/ROOT/gentoo kgdboc=ttyS0,115200' kexec -e 4. Watch the machine jump into the new kernel with the changes applied. Then either run regression tests or do a post-mortem analysis depending on whether it successfully booted. It would be really nice to have something similar for the other platforms. I imagine that Pure Darwin could be used in place of Mac OS X.
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