[Soc-coordination] Status Report of ZFS on Linux Integration, Week 11

[Aron Xu]

Hi everyone,

This is the twelfth report of ZFS on Linux Integration GSoC project.

In this week I've get the grub2 patches build[1] with help from
existing work in the
grub2 package of Gentoo[2], thanks to Richard Yao and Darik Horn. I
have verified this grub2 package works on recognizing zfs root
partition. There are also several changes to the package makes it
works while installation and d-i image generation.

I've upgraded the d-i generation environment to Sid, and generated a
new mini.iso[3] which default to Sid. Now it takes advantages of using
newer version of packages, which solves some small problems that I
have when I was playing with wheezy. In this image, udebs of spl-linux
is built using the source already in archive, zfs-linux package adds a
small hack that passes --disable-selinux during build (this will be
worked cleanly into the package in near future). The kernel modules
are built against 3.10-2-amd64. grub2 udeb is what I've built from
previous item. Other udeb packages are directly from Sid archive. Here
[4] is the localudebs directory.

Following tests are conducted using the image and results follows:
1) Using /boot on ext4 and ZFS as /:
This renders an error because when creating root pool,
rpool/ROOT/debian/boot is mounted to /target/boot and got the boot
property set. Another test to do is to see whether manually destroy
rpool/ROOT/debian/boot can work around here.

2) Using ZFS as /.
This makes the installation process works, but the step of installing
grub2 package into chroot have met a small trouble. Current grub2 d-i
wrapper, grub-installer, only recognize bootfs name that is as short
as "rpool/debian" (which was the case for wheezy's kfreebsd), but when
we are using something like "rpool/ROOT/debian/boot" then it cannot
determine its canonical path. This is to be fixed and it should work
then. So I haven't got a chance to boot the installed system.

Last thing is that zfs-linux source package was rejected from NEW
because of some detailed dependency problem, which I was thinking
about keeping compatibility with people who have installed deb
packages from zfsonlinux.org repository. Now stuff may cause other
problems are removed and -dbg packages are merged into one and
re-uploaded, so people upgrading from zfsonlinux.org packages should
remove any zfs debug packages before performing it because upgrade
path of those -dbg packages aren't guaranteed.


[1]http://people.debian.org/~aron/gsoc2013/week11/grub2/
[2]http://sources.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/gentoo-x86/sys-boot/grub/files/grub-2.00-zfs-feature-flag-support-r1.patch
[3]http://people.debian.org/~aron/gsoc2013/week11/zol-mini-amd64-20130909.iso
[4]http://people.debian.org/~aron/gsoc2013/week11/localudebs/

-- 
Regards,
Aron Xu