Some Notes for ZFS on FreeBSD

cptsalek — 2009-03-08T21:12:00Z

There are two issues I stumbled upon while using/setting up a ZFS pool on FreeBSD:

Don't use generic device names, e.g. ad0, da1
On Solaris it's quite common to specify a device without any slice, thus specifying the entire disk. While this works on FreeBSD, too, it leads to some nasty error messages during boot because any GEOM/GPT disklabel is removed. Create a GPT disklabel and add a partition using the freebsd-zfs style instead - or simply use a standard FreeBSD slice covering the entire disk.
Set geli_$dev_autodetach="NO" in /etc/rc.conf for all geli encrypted disks that will be part of your Z Pool
This might be common knowledge, but I needed some time to figure this out: After a fresh boot issuing a "zpool status" obviously closed all geli providers, thus rendering the pool unusable. Well, this probably doesn't happen if you have zfs_enable="YES" in your /etc/rc.conf

PS: I installed FreeBSD-CURRENT 8.0, it comes with ZPool Version 13!

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