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

#! /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

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.

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.

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.

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!