ZFS boot!

Looks like ZFS boot is finally coming to Solaris 10, and with that wonderful, secure upgrades and patching. The zfs root support have been available for some time for Solaris Nevada [X86|X64|IPE] as already seen in use in project Indiana (OpenSolaris 2008.05). It is now soaking into Nevada for Sparc also, the last ZFS boot parts was integrated in SNV88 and the support in the non-opensource parts (installer) is supposed to be available in SNV90, which is due in a week or so.

Even better, it looks like Solars 10 Update 6 will contain this functionality, according to a Sun presentation:

ZFS Root (S10 Update 6)
● Brings all the ZFS goodness to /
● Checksums, compression, replication, snapshots and clones
● Boot from any dataset
● Patching becomes safe
● Take snapshot, apply patch... rollback if you don't like it
● Live upgrade becomes fast
● Create clone (instant), upgrade, boot from clone
● No “extra partition”
● 10U6:Based on new Solaris boot arch.
● ZFS can easily create multiple boot environments
● GRUB can easily manage them

The whole presentation is here.

I cant wait to to apply my first set of patches, or perform a upgrade on a ZFS snapshot. Or why not daily snapshot of / and perhaps before you install that 3rd party software....

Easy, cheap, fast and safe modifications to the OS and boot environment!