ZFS to the rescue!

So this weekend I had to do a system reinstall. Thankfully I had all my data on a pair of sata drives in a ZFS raidz. But I had to totally reinstall my system with a new motherboard, new SATA controller, etc.

I had to redo a bunch of things manually... NIS, passed, DHCP, etc.

The one thing that I didn't have to worry about: ZFS. I just plugged my SATA drives in, and did "zpool import -f data" (my dataset was called "data", which I could have figured out by just doing "zfs import" without options.)

That was it. One command only, and my raidz mirror was back in business, mounted in the right place, and even the right ZFS fileystems were NFS exported with the right options. Thank-you ZFS!


ZFS developers, I owe you a round, or three. Let me know if you want want to collect. :-)

Favorite things in OpenSolaris not in Solaris 10

A few things that I love about OpenSolaris, but that Solaris 10 lacks:

* Xorg default support for Intel GMA 950
* SATA ATAPI device support
* WPA (coming in build 64)
* NWAM (network auto-magic)
* DMFE is GLDv3

I'm not sure which of these will be coming to a Solaris 10 update in the future, but I can tell you I was immensely pleased with my upgrade from Solaris 10 update 4 (on a Intel mobo, with a Core 2 Duo cpu) to Solaris Nevada b62. As part of the deal, I switched to a SATA DVD drive; my system is now entirely SATA (no legacy PATA ribbon cables in the box!)

I'm sure there are lots of other useful features too, but at this point, I've put Nevada into "production" use at home, and I'm not looking back.

(And yes, I realize b62 isn't the latest, but I didn't have a copy of snv_63, and the machine I was "reinstalling" ... thanks to an unexpected mobo replacement, was my network server.)

Learning to hate SMF

Some of you may recall my recent putback of the removal of in.tnamed.

Well, there has been some nasty fallout, thanks to SMF and the upgrade process. snv64 (which will have to be respun as a result of this nastiness) was hanging during upgrade, thanks to chicken and egg dependencies in the upgrade script.

I fixed the hang, but there is a warning message coming from inetd that I can't seem to locate.

Along the way, I've found references to the network/tname service in a few surprising places. The things I've had to edit, thanks to SMF:

usr/src/tools/scripts/bfu.sh
usr/src/pkgdefs/SUNWcsr/postinstall
usr/src/cmd/svc/profile/generic_net_limited.xml
usr/src/cmd/svc/prophist/prophist.SUNWcsr
usr/src/cmd/cmd-inet/usr.sbin/tname.xml (removed)

And *still* we see a warning from inetd. See 6556092 in bugster for more info.

Anyway, I'm waiting for folks to decide whether to allow the warning to stay, or to backout the change to remove in.tnamed. If the later is taken, I will run screaming from the process, and just leave in.tnamed alone.

In my opinion, removing the tname.xml should have been sufficient. But thanks to SMF's binary databases, it creates a major headache. Can someone from the SMF team please unravel this maze?

LSI MegaRaid SAS driver (Thanks dlg!)

David Gwynne (dlg on #opensolaris) has created a very nice driver for LSI MegaRaid SAS controllers. You can find it here.

I have not got any hardware, so I've not tested it, but this driver is the model of simplicity and elegance for an HBA, from what I can tell, weighing in at only 1500 lines. A great deal of that is no doubt thanks to the simple model of the hardware, but the simplicity and elegance in the driver should be credited to David as well.

I'd like to sponsor this myself for integration into Nevada, but I haven't got any hardware. If you have hardware to loan for qualification testing, give me a shout, because this looks like a prime candidate for a Nevada integration.

hme gldv3 status report

The conversion of hme to gldv3 looks like it is a success. The driver "Just Worked" from the first time I loaded it. Yay.

Still to be tested are the main areas of risk: VLANs, SUSPEND/RESUME, and DDI detach. Stay tuned for more on that front.

I'm going to have to preserve qfe as a seperate driver, I think, because renaming/renumbering devices is just going to cause too much grief in the field. But, what I'm going to do is make hme.c and qfe.c very small (say ~50 lines each), and have them use a common misc module to provide the entire functionality.

I have now received several qfe boards as well, so I'll be testing on x86 soon, as well.

Watch this space for the code review to be posted.

For the curious, some size comparisions:

gd78059@sr1-umpk-52{8}> wc pcic/usr/src/uts/sun/io/hme.c{,.orig}
6498 19423 171291 pcic/usr/src/uts/sun/io/hme.c
8889 26403 232421 pcic/usr/src/uts/sun/io/hme.c.orig
15387 45826 403712 total

size in the kernel (as reported by modinfo): old = 63384, new 47184

PSARC 2007/243 approved

Subject says it all. This is the eri conversion to nemo. There is more testing yet to be done, but note that this means that eri will inherit VLAN and link aggregation support. Neat, huh?

In the Bay Area this week

I'm up in MPK this week. (Wed, Thur, and leaving Friday night.) If any fellow Solaris geeks up here are up for a pub outing, e-mail me.