On Wed, 17 Oct 2012, Craig Sanders wrote:
The FreeBSD man page at the following URL mentions volumes, same as the zfsonlinux man page.
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=zfs&manpath=FreeBSD+9.0-RELEASE
the text for 'zfs create' is almost identical to the linux version.
zfs create [-ps] [-b blocksize] [-o property=value] ... -V size volume
Creates a volume of the given size. The volume is exported as a block device in /dev/zvol/{dsk,rdsk}/path, where path is the name of the volume in the ZFS namespace. The size represents the logical size as exported by the device. By default, a reservation of equal size is created.
Yes, it works, and gives me a (character) device: # zfs create -b 512 -V 512 zpool/testvol # ls -l /dev/zvol/zpool/testvol crw-r----- 1 root operator 0, 204 Oct 17 16:41 /dev/zvol/zpool/testvol
Anyway, would a zvol be significantly better than a file in the zfs as I do now?
performance wise? yes, definitely
management convenience? almost certainly. e.g. zfs snapshot instead of qemu-img snapshot.
I have the disks for the VirtualBox in one directory and snapshot it. Thanks for finding "my zvols":-) Peter