Re: Integrated ZFS for Gentoo - WAS Re: [gentoo-user] Optional /usr merge in Gentoo

[Mark David Dumlao <madumlao@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Sep 2, 2013 at 4:47 PM, Joerg Schilling
<Joerg.Schilling@fokus.fraunhofer.de> wrote:
> Mark David Dumlao <madumlao@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> > > > the disk... OOPS.  This is a classic "chicken and egg" situation.
>> > >
>> > > On Solaris no problem with loadable modules - everything is
>> > > dynamically loaded.  ***YOU NEED A GRUB THAT UNDERSTANDS ZFS AND THAT
>> > > GIVES A ZFS INTERFACE TO THE KERNEL TO USE BEFORE ZFS WAS LOADED***.
>>
>> I'm confused as to what this means. Grub reads a filesystem, loads a kernel
>> with options, and may give it an initrd. What happens from then on is none
>> of grub's business. The filesystem it reads from and the one the kernel
>> uses may be completely unrelated - this is why we have /boot filesystems.
>>
>> At what point does grub "present a zfs interface for the kernel to use"?
>
> After it booted the kernel
>
> You may not know dynamic kernels as Linux is a static kernel that just may load
> additional modules _after_ it mounted the root fs.
>
> Solaris is dynamic from the beginning:

Ah I see. But I think by default when we talk about "the kernel" on
this mailing list,
it's assumed that we're talking about Linux. And in the Linux case,
Grub does not do
anything like provide a filesystem interface to Linux. It just loads
the kernel into memory,
and passes it any arguments, like the initrd. So your grub needs to be
able to read the
filesystem containing the kernel and that's it. If the filesystem
containing the kernel is
also a zfs filesystem, then your grub needs a driver that can read
that filesystem.

Well sys-boot/grub-2.00 provides one. See /boot/grub/zfs.mod
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