I just had a thought that in the case of zfs boot might satisfy both factions.
How about swap at the start of the disk, something big enough for a full OS install+Studio but not much more, and the rest unused? Unused sounds scary, but won't zfs grow its zpool automatically if the underlying devices grow? So if after awhile it turns out you want a separate slice for another zpool, you could create that from the unused space. Or if it turns out you're better off with a single big zpool, you just grow the slice it lives in to suck up all the contiguous unused space, and you've got it. Effectively, you can postpone the decision until you find out what's best for you (which you couldn't do without reloading if you gave all the space to a single zpool right away). Is there anything underway to support dumps to a zvol? (let's say same restrictions as to layout for the zpool as for one that was bootable, to keep it simple). If that happens, there won't even be any excuse for a separate swap partition (I think the performance of a raw slice would be a minor issue; more RAM so swapping was a rare occurrence would be a better answer, IMO). This message posted from opensolaris.org
