[indiana-discuss] ZFS to the max

[Eric Boutilier]

On Thu, 28 Jun 2007, Ian Murdock wrote:
> Dave Miner wrote:
>> Ian Murdock wrote:
>>> One big win if we can do everything in a ZFS pool is that we don't have
>>> to worry about partitioning. Big simplification there.
>>> Presumably, all "partitioning" becomes is resizing existing
>>> partitions to make room for the Solaris (ZFS) partition,
>>> and I see parted has been ported to Solaris, so we
>>> could presumably use libparted in the Solaris installer?
>> 
>> If you want non-destructive resizing, then you need something like 
>> libparted, though its support for doing so with NTFS left a great deal to 
>> be desired when we evaluated it a year ago.  Integrating it into an 
>> installer is possible, though not something we have plans to fund at the 
>> moment.  I'm told that Vista can shrink itself, and since most Linux users 
>> already have parted, is it acceptable to ask the user to perform that task 
>> first in the native environment of the OS they already have installed?  A 
>> conservative point of view about data preservation would seem to argue for 
>> that (and is why we've declined to make that move with Solaris so far), but 
>> perhaps we don't want to be so conservative with Indiana, and admittedly 
>> the user expectations here may be that we should.  My personal belief is 
>> that most users don't have any appreciation for how risky it is to have 
>> Linux or OpenSolaris (or any OS) attempting to reconfigure the storage of 
>> some alien OS, nor do those same users likely have the system backups they 
>> should.
>
> Agree that integrating resizing into the installer is not a priority.
> Also agree that we should recommend users do their resizing in the OS
> they're already running.
>
> It would be nice if we could integrate *something* into the Live CD
> though, assuming we go that route, more as a convenience than anything
> else. Telling users they have to find a Linux CD to do
> resizing if their native OS can't do it isn't particularly appealing..
>
> I see that GParted is in Belenix.. How functional/reliable is it?


See the BeleniX 0.6 release notes:
http://www.genunix.org/distributions/belenix_site/?q=node/44
The 4th bullet from the top and the `Known Issues' section.



> If it works well, could we simply integrate that into the Live CD
> for people who want/need to resize before installing?
>
> -ian
> -- 
> Ian Murdock
> 650-331-9324
> http://ianmurdock.com/
>
> "Don't look back--something might be gaining on you." --Satchel Paige
> _______________________________________________
> indiana-discuss mailing list
> indiana-discuss at opensolaris.org
> http://opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/indiana-discuss
>