Date: Wed, 28 May 2008 14:54:09 -0500
From: Dean Roehrich <Dean.Roehrich at sun.com>
Subject: SAM-QFS Support for Solaris Zones [PSARC/2008/347
FastTrack timeout 06/04/2008]
...
Booting zones that use Shared-QFS filesystems:
When Shared-QFS filesystems are intended to be accessible from
multiple non-global zones those filesystems must be mounted in the
global zone and then non-global zones must use loopback mounts to
access those filesystems.
Problem:
Any zones marked as autoboot=true can be booted before the
Shared-QFS filesystems are mounted in the global zone, and
loopback mounts of those filesystems executed by the zone boot
process will get the covered mountpoint.
Solution:
To address this issue, the zones will be booted only after the
Shared-QFS filesystems have been mounted in the global zone. The
existing sam-fsd daemon will be modified to monitor the
filesystems and will boot the zones when their required
filesystems become available.
Zones being booted by sam-fsd must be marked as autoboot=false,
and they must be listed in /etc/opt/SUNWsamfs/samzone.conf with
the names of the filesystems on which they depend. The sam-fsd
daemon will start any zone as soon as the Shared-QFS filesystems
requested by that zone become available.
This proposed solution strikes me as a gross hack. sam-fsd's job is
to help implement file system behavior. It seems completely wrong to
have to teach it about zones in the first place, much less about how
to start zones.
Have you looked at using SMF to manage the proper sequencing through
dependencies? If something's missing that prevents that approach from
working, I'd rather see the missing piece be added than to pervert
sam-fsd into booting zones.
-- Glenn
