[pca] Bitten by 141445-09

[Ben Taylor]

On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 9:46 AM, Allen Eastwood <mixal at paconet.us> wrote:
> A while back I posted about using the combination of ZFS roots and
> Live Upgrade when patching.  I've made that my default patching
> strategy and in doing so have avoided the last few major issues that
> have come up with patches, including this one.

That's the beauty of Live Upgrade.  When it doesn't break.

> My ZFS root pools do not have /var on a separate dataset.

do you mean a separate file system, or do you mean in a different pool?

> Even if you are on UFS root still, you can use Live Upgrade...it takes
> longer, but patching an ABE on an alternate mount point seems to be
> MUCH safer.  I've applied this, and the last few kernel patches on
> multiple sparc, CMT and x86 systems completely without incident.

Agreed.  I have regularly used multiple 20G / with ABE space for
8, 9 and 10 (pre-zfs) for this exact purpose.  Depending on the size
of the physical disk (and I was almost always mirroring with SDS)
was the determining factor for sizing.  for 300G disk, I leaned towards
30-40G, depending on how the system resources were to be used.


I'm real crazy about not having a separate /var, but the recoverabilty far
outweighs the issue for me about having /var on a / slice.  Real monitoring
of disk space (along with notification) mitigates space issues that might
arise from something running away with /var space.