I would like to ask for a review and/or testing of the following three patches: http://people.freebsd.org/~avg/zfsboot.patches.diff

These patches add support for booting from an arbitrary filesystem of any detected ZFS pool. A filesystem could be selected in zfsboot and thus will affectfrom where zfsloader would be loaded. zfsboot passes information about the boot pool and filesystem to zfsloader, which uses those for loaddev and default value of currdev. A different pool+filesystem could be selected in zfsloader for booting kernel. Also if vfs.root.mountfrom is not explicitly set and is not derived from fstab, then it gets set to the selected boot filesystem.

This should could be used as a foundation for the support of Solaris-like boot environment selection. I believe that other people have already developed scripts utilizing ZFS capabilities to provide other aspects of management of boot environments.

I am particularly interested in reviews of my attempt to make ZFS boot support arch-independent. The arches, of course, would have to add some code to make use of that support. Currently I only enabled it for x86.

Thank you very much!