On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 2:04 PM, James Carlson <carls...@workingcode.com>wrote:
> On 09/10/13 12:31, Ben Taylor wrote: > > 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. > > It'd be somewhat interesting to know the details on how it could be > argued, because a separate /usr and /var are explicitly described in > filesystem(5). As with all things on Solaris, the official reference on > what ought to work (and what is not documented to work) is the man page. > Well, I suppose with Solaris 11 (though haven't actually booted it), the man page might still say something about /usr, though it wouldn't have much relevance. In Solaris 10, UFS was still a viable file system there. > > However, a separate /usr makes no real sense to me in this day and age, > given that the only substantial reason that support ever existed was for > the extremely wacky "clients with tiny root disks and NFS-mounted /usr" > configuration. Nothing other than unusually good fortune could protect > someone trying to do that in 2013. > In the early 90s, I did NFS-mounted /usr configs. Later, the concept of the netboot client was pretty cool, but I don't think many people used it, and eventually the option went away. > A separate /var makes sense to me, but you do need to be a bit careful > with it, and I would not be shocked to find that there things there that > don't work terribly well. In particular, I'd expect that you have to > use legacy (/etc/vfstab) mounting in order to make it work. > For a separate /var on Solaris 10/ZFS, there's no vfstab entry required. It's fully supported these days, after I put up a 6 month battle with support in 2009. When I got notification that it had been fixed, I was almost incredulous at the minimal amount of work required for one or two of the initialization *shell* scripts. > > For what it's worth, I don't do that on my own systems. I just create > zfs mounts over the key (growable) mounts below /var ... particularly > /var/cores (where I set coreadm), /var/crash, /var/mail, and /var/log. > Plus, having separate sub-mounts gives me much finer-grained accounting > and control. That's sort of the whole point of ZFS. > We use /var/home on the remaining Solaris systems here, and that works fairly well. If we weren't moving away from Solaris, I might consider some of those sub mounts off /var. > > My point being is that, a separate /usr ZFS file system has had no > support > > or testing for this type of configuration. > > Testing is a separate and much more important point, I think: if you do > things the way nobody else does them, intentionally or otherwise, then > you're a test pilot. Much luck, and make sure you've repacked your > parachute recently. > Well, at the time, I used your argument that it's in the man page and supported, and there was no announcement of removing /var from filesystem(5) for ZFS, among other things. Stubbornness pays off occasionally... _______________________________________________ OpenIndiana-discuss mailing list OpenIndiana-discuss@openindiana.org http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss