23.10.0 GRUB boot screen after ZFS upgrade

Joined
Dec 23, 2023
Messages
6
Never upgrade your boot pool. Full stop.
understood!
but I already upgrade, and so I need support from bootloader.
proxmox, for example, use custom systemd-boot which support lattest zfs, why truenas can't do something ?

now I use zfsbootmenu from usbflashdrive and it works fine - this is one of the solutions
why not ? I can't understand...
 

Jailer

Not strong, but bad
Joined
Sep 12, 2014
Messages
4,977
why not ? I can't understand...
Because TrueNAS Scale is considered an "appliance" not just another linux distribution. When you go tinkering under the hood you stand a very good chance of breaking things as you have discovered. Your only option at this point is to do a fresh install of TrueNAS and upload a saved copy of your config. You do have a backup of your configuration correct?

If you have TrueNAS installed in a virtual environment (we don't know because you haven't shared that information) then if you have scheduled backups in your hypervisor then that may be a recovery option for you.

Good luck.
 

aednichols

Dabbler
Joined
Oct 1, 2022
Messages
11
I ran into this foot-gun as well, fortunately a reinstall + restore was fairly painless. Thank goodness I always save my config.

Perhaps TrueNAS should stop advertising available ZFS upgrades in notifications and let OS upgrades handle it. It's confusing that end-users are supposed to upgrade the data pools, but the boot pool is the exact opposite. Yes, technically the notifications are correct in that they only list data pools, but my brain saw a whole slew of them and thought, "go upgrade all the pools."
 

HoneyBadger

actually does care
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iXsystems
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Feb 6, 2014
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5,112
I ran into this foot-gun as well, fortunately a reinstall + restore was fairly painless. Thank goodness I always save my config.

Perhaps TrueNAS should stop advertising available ZFS upgrades in notifications and let OS upgrades handle it. It's confusing that end-users are supposed to upgrade the data pools, but the boot pool is the exact opposite. Yes, technically the notifications are correct in that they only list data pools, but my brain saw a whole slew of them and thought, "go upgrade all the pools."
zfs compatibility flags should prevent this now; even if someone manually zpool upgrade's the boot pool it shouldn't enable any features that will break GRUB.
 

aednichols

Dabbler
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Oct 1, 2022
Messages
11
zfs compatibility flags should prevent this now; even if someone manually zpool upgrade's the boot pool it shouldn't enable any features that will break GRUB.
Oh nice, I think I missed that on my initial skim, I do see that it's mentioned on a prior page.
 

danb35

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Aug 16, 2011
Messages
15,504
Perhaps TrueNAS should stop advertising available ZFS upgrades in notifications
It doesn't, for the boot pool. You also can't upgrade the boot pool through the GUI. So if you're using the system as it's intended to be used, you won't have this problem. Unfortunately, there's a lot of bad information out there (including in this very forum) telling people to run things like zpool upgrade -a at the shell, which will result in exactly this problem.
 

aednichols

Dabbler
Joined
Oct 1, 2022
Messages
11
It doesn't, for the boot pool. You also can't upgrade the boot pool through the GUI. So if you're using the system as it's intended to be used, you won't have this problem. Unfortunately, there's a lot of bad information out there (including in this very forum) telling people to run things like zpool upgrade -a at the shell, which will result in exactly this problem.
Thanks for pointing out there is a GUI for it now. You're absolutely right, if one sticks to the GUI, can't cause the problem. I'd been doing it on the CLI since I started using FreeNAS in 2012.
 

danb35

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Aug 16, 2011
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15,504
Thanks for pointing out there is a GUI for it now.
Upgrading the ZFS version/features of the pool has always been in the GUI, at least as far back as FreeNAS 9.3, which is now ten years old. There's never been a need to do it at the CLI.
 
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