From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Sat Apr 23 17:00:08 2011 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1766D106566B for ; Sat, 23 Apr 2011 17:00:08 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from christopher-ml@telting.org) Received: from mail.telting.org (mail.telting.org [204.109.56.249]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id DA2A88FC0A for ; Sat, 23 Apr 2011 17:00:07 +0000 (UTC) Received: from ares.local (cpe-76-168-204-255.socal.res.rr.com [76.168.204.255]) by mail.telting.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 672692846A for ; Sat, 23 Apr 2011 17:00:06 +0000 (UTC) Message-ID: <4DB30596.3030609@telting.org> Date: Sat, 23 Apr 2011 10:00:06 -0700 From: Chris Telting User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; FreeBSD i386; en-US; rv:1.9.2.15) Gecko/20110305 Thunderbird/3.1.9 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: zfs partition for /etc? X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Sat, 23 Apr 2011 17:00:08 -0000 I'm using PC-BSD and ZFS. ZFS is outstanding. Somewhat less impressed with PCBSD. I've grown addicted to ZFS I think. I love it's snapshots although I already know of new features I would love in new development beyond v28. At least for PCBSD it's nice to be able to rollback to a usable system and so I play with my system a lot more. The mount listing needs to be revamped because I can easily imagine in the future 30 plus zfs mounts, especially with jails. Some indentation and grouping options along with filters. And I think replacing the mounted volumes in fstab with config filenames. A nice thing would be allowing snapshots of directories separate from volumes. And it definitely needs whitespace support for unionfs and maybe possibly it's own unionfs solution with more capabilities. For example it would be nice to promote a snapshot (or the reverse to generate one) into what I'll call an overlay to be able to apply to new directory trees. Something that integrates with snapshots and clones somewhat. And it needs a very low memory operation for systems as low as 64MB. Sure it might crawl but many of it's features are indispensable. Please excuse my rambling. So so on to my question. I'm sure others have thought about this. I kind of want /etc to be it's own zfs partition so that I can snapshot it separate from everything else and preserve it without much effort. But I don't think I can do that because of booting. The system depends on /etc before it mounts it's first file system. Same issue I experienced a couple years back when I tried to do unionfs on /etc. Is it possible to mount multiple partitions from the kernel read only for single user mode and bootup? I almost feel like there should be an fstab for /boot just to be able to do something like this. I want to be able to snapshot and rollback my base system in seconds. Since I use separate volumes for /usr and /var I'll accept using a script. My only thought is to generate and archive diffs for /etc though another modular script to match snapshot labels. Any thoughts? Chris