number 9

Since your hypnotoad we must try it …

Works great on SX:CE (Solaris 11) - make it “really SXCE”.

Beating the buzzer is easy:

1. Type your command to turn on compression but don’t hit return.
2. Make your way up to the “Profile” (”F2_Begin Installation”) screen.
3. Hit “F2″ and mouse to your other window with the compress command in it.

4. Wait for this in the first window (assuming mirrored root):

Preparing system for Solaris install

Configuring disk (c1t0d0)
- Creating Fdisk partition table
- Creating Solaris disk label (VTOC)

Configuring disk (c1t1d0)
- Creating Fdisk partition table
- Creating Solaris disk label (VTOC)
- Creating pool rpool
*** NOW ***
- Creating swap zvol for pool rpool
- Creating dump zvol for pool rpool

If you hit [Enter] where it says “*** NOW ***” you won’t get your cursor back until the “Creating dump zvol for pool rpool” is completed and you can hit [Enter] later than that; but then you’ll miss a few Mbytes …

It worked for me but all I got was:

$ zfs get -r compressratio rpool
NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE
rpool compressratio 1.54x -
rpool/ROOT compressratio 1.65x -
rpool/ROOT/snv_90 compressratio 1.65x -
rpool/ROOT/snv_90/var compressratio 1.71x -
rpool/dump compressratio 1.00x -
rpool/export compressratio 1.00x -
rpool/export/home compressratio 1.00x -
rpool/export/home/dick compressratio 1.00x -
rpool/swap compressratio 1.00x -

Still I think it was good than it did not compress the swap.

Thanks for the tip!

Maybe you used b91 (latest) and the distro is different enough to affect the compression ratio?

Thanks for the comment, you prodded me into finding a neater way of getting the timing right, and updated the post to show it.

This is all a hack of course - be nice if there was an install option just to do this, maybe it’s coming.

2 things: firstly SXCE doesn’t need you to use pfexec, since the terminal is already running as root.

Secondly, here is a script that also makes the root pool compressed.

The script (I’m calling it compress.sh) is as follows:

#! /bin/sh
until [ "`zpool list rpool`" ];
do
:
done
zfs set compression=on rpool
until [ "`zfs list rpool/ROOT`" ];
do
:
done
zfs set compression=on rpool/ROOT

Then to run it:

chmod +x compress.sh
./compress.sh .

Cheers

Andrew.

@andrew : thanks , that’s a lot cleaner; I’ve updated the post to include both changes.

@dick : no problem. It took a bit of experimenting to get that - I was surprised how easy it was in the end!

If you invoke the script using

sh readysetgo.sh

then you don’t need the shebang line ( #! /bin/sh ) , so that makes the script one line shorter as well.

Cheers

Andrew.

Here’s a slightly more fancy version that prints success/failure messages and also disables access time stamps on all files, which should speed things up a little:

#! /bin/sh
echo
echo “Waiting for root pool to be created…”
until [ "`zpool list rpool 2>/dev/null`" ];
do
:
done
TEMP=`zfs set compression=on rpool 2>/dev/null`
if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
echo “Successfully enabled compression on rpool”
else
echo “ERROR: could not enable compression on rpool”
fi
TEMP=`zfs set atime=off rpool 2>/dev/null`
if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
echo “Successfully disabled access time updates on rpool”
else
echo “ERROR: could not disable access time updates on rpool”
fi
echo
echo “Waiting for rpool/ROOT to be created…”
until [ "`zfs list rpool/ROOT 2>/dev/null`" ];
do
:
done
TEMP=`zfs set compression=on rpool/ROOT 2>/dev/null`
if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
echo “Successfully enabled compression on rpool/ROOT”
else
echo “ERROR: could not enable compression on rpool/ROOT”
fi
TEMP=`zfs set atime=off rpool/ROOT 2>/dev/null`
if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
echo “Successfully disabled access time updates on rpool/ROOT”
else
echo “ERROR: could not disable access time updates on rpool/ROOT”
fi
echo

Cheers @Andrew, as you can tell shell isn’t my native language ( http://number9.hellooperator.net/articles/2007/10/12/zfs-rolling-snapshots )

Personally I don’t see the atime tweak as a big deal, since you can change that afterwards easily. Compression is a special case, since it really helps to enable that while the filesystems are empty. Might help others though (this post gets a fair bit of traffic, which is a bit of a shock to me).

I’m hoping for an installer checkbox at some point to make all this moot anyway