ZFS even under Solaris does not strictly require libshare to be
available. The current implementation attempts to dlopen() the
library to access the needed symbols. If this fails libshare
support is simply disabled.
This means that on Linux we only need the most minimal libshare
implementation. In fact just enough to prevent the build from
failing. Longer term we can decide if we want to implement a
libshare library like Solaris. At best this would be an abstraction
layer between ZFS and NFS/SMB. Alternately, we can drop libshare
entirely and directly integrate ZFS with Linux's NFS/SMB.
Finally the bare bones user-libshare.m4 test was dropped. If we
do decide to implement libshare at some point it will surely be
as part of this package so the check is not needed.
If libselinux is detected on your system at configure time link
against it. This allows us to use a library call to detect if
selinux is enabled and if it is to pass the mount option:
"context=\"system_u:object_r:file_t:s0"
For now this is required because none of the existing selinux
policies are aware of the zfs filesystem type. Because of this
they do not properly enable xattr based labeling even though
zfs supports all of the required hooks.
Until distro's add zfs as a known xattr friendly fs type we
must use mntpoint labeling. Alternately, end users could modify
their existing selinux policy with a little guidance.
ZFS works best when it is notified as soon as possible when a device
failure occurs. This allows it to immediately start any recovery
actions which may be needed. In theory Linux supports a flag which
can be set on bio's called FAILFAST which provides this quick
notification by disabling the retry logic in the lower scsi layers.
That's the theory at least. In practice is turns out that while the
flag exists you oddly have to set it with the BIO_RW_AHEAD flag.
And even when it's set it you may get retries in the low level
drivers decides that's the right behavior, or if you don't get the
right error codes reported to the scsi midlayer.
Unfortunately, without additional kernels patchs there's not much
which can be done to improve this. Basically, this just means that
it may take 2-3 minutes before a ZFS is notified properly that a
device has failed. This can be improved and I suspect I'll be
submitting patches upstream to handle this.
Brian Behlendorf