Re: ZFS with Linux: An Open Plea

[Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de>]

* Theodore Tso:

> we can continue trying to innovate around better filesystem and LVM
> storage technologies, as opposed to trying to chase the ZFS tail
> lights.

Indeed.  Here's a gem from the official ZFS FAQ:

| What can I do if ZFS panics on every boot?
| 
|     ZFS is designed to survive arbitrary hardware failures through the
|     use of redundancy (mirroring or RAID-Z). Unfortunately, certain
|     failures in non-replicated configurations can cause ZFS to panic
|     when trying to load the pool. This is a bug, and will be fixed in
|     the near future (along with several other nifty features like
|     background scrubbing and the ability to see a list of corrupted
|     files). In the meantime, if you find yourself in the situation
|     where you cannot boot due to a corrupt pool, do the followng:
| 
|        1. boot using '-m milestone=none'
|        2. # mount -o remount /
|        3. # rm /etc/zfs/zpool.cache
|        4. # reboot
| 
|     This will remove all knowledge of pools from your system. You will
|     have to re-create your pool and restore from backup.

<http://opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/faq/#zfspanic>

I keep hoping that this FAQ entry is outdated, but the date on that
page is rather current. 8-/