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Solaris 10 6/06 and ZFS behavior

I'm running the official Solaris 10 6/06 (aka Update 2) release on an x86 laptop.
This release comes with ZFS version 2 and I decided to try it out a bit.
Having played with ZFS before running on various builds of Solaris Express Community Release (SX:CR for short) i was interested to give ZFS on a Solaris 10 release a spin.
I got to this 6/06 install via an upgrade from the Update 1 release (which didn't come with ZFS) and thus the filesystem with its slices was already laid out.
So i had no more room for a couple of slices to create a ZFS storage pool from (let alone having a second drive).
Well, no biggy 'cuz ZFS also lets you experiment by creating a pool from files (for experimental purposes according to ZFS(1M)).
So I created 2 1 gigabyte files thru mkfile(1M) within my homedirectory handled by the automounter.
Once the files were created, i created a storage pool out of them.

Commands used:
# zpool create zstorage /home/marcovl/zstor1 /home/marcovl/zstor2 (zpool requires absolute pathnames to the location of the files to be used)
# zfs create zstorage/stuff
# zfs set mountpoint=/export/stuff zstorage/stuff

Well, all was well, i got a storage pool of 2 gigs mounted on /zstorage and a zfs filesystem called zstorage/stuff mounted on /export/stuff.

I hadn't run the smpatch utility for a while and there were some patches to be applied so i decided to patch the system.
After the smpatch process was finished i had to reboot the system for some patches to be applied cleanly.

Then came the surprise: my freshly created ZFS storage pool wasn't automounted by default after system reboot (the pool did still exist however so i was curious as to what caused the storage pool not to be mounted after reboot).

The trick is that you can't put the backing store for a ZFS pool in an automounted directory and have it come up at boot time 'cuz the automounter doesn't start until after the "zfs mount" runs.
My investigation didn't take that long (actually i found this cause reasonably quickly by using the svcs(1) utility).

In other words, create the 2 files for the storage pool anywhere but under /home and you'll be fine.

posted by Marco @ 21:15