hole_birth ZFS feature = FreeNAS orphan?

[Warren Hughes]

FreeNAS 9.2.1 introduced hole_birth ZFS feature. Without doing enough research I upgraded my ZFS pool which enable this feature.

I haven't been able to find any other OS/NAS combo that my pool is now compatible with.

Have tried:
- ZFS on Linux
- NAS4Free
- OpenIndiana
- OmniOS
- NexentaStor
- Illumian

Anyone have any ideas? Otherwise I'll need to build a new pool (without this feature enabled) and port over to it.

 

[cyberjock]

Yep... that feature is bleeding edge. In your case, you're going to bleed because of it. Your only option is to make a new pool with some other OS that will also be compatible with FreeNAS.

Quite literally, NOTHING is compatible with that feature yet. It's that new. If they have active development, they will eventually support it. But when it will be supported depends on that community.

 

[Warren Hughes]

I know I stuffed up upgrading my pool - but I'm wondering why FreeNAS would include a ZFS feature used nowhere else? Does it add some required functionality?

One of the benefits of ZFS is pool portability between Operating Systems.

I'm not wanting my NAS to be bleeding edge running a stable RELEASE.

Am I missing something?

 

[cyberjock]

Because FreeNAS has changed from a "reliable stable OS" to a "bleeding edge cutthroat OS". Just look at 9.2.1, 9.2.1.1, and 9.2.1.2(both releases with the same number.. haha). They released it before it was thoroughly tested, and it's making them look like fools.

If you aren't happy with bleeding edge, you can always NOT upgrade your pool. I'm still on v28, and on purpose. I currently have no ETA on when I will upgrade to v5000. I'm still on FreeNAS 9.2.0.. on purpose too!

 

[Warren Hughes]

Point taken - guess I will just have to wait for the other OS platforms to catch-up on hole_birth as moving 15TB to a new pool requires more spare storage than I have access to :-(

 

[matsim]

For the record: hole_birth isn't a FreeNAS thing by origin, it's coming from Delphix which is employing a couple of core ZFS developers and its them they've upstreamed it.
iX has likely backported the feature directly from illumos instead of waiting for FreeBSD to catch up first (I haven't seen found it even in FreeBSD-CURRENT)

Her are are some links to code in other places

• illumos-gate, the canonical upstream for most illumos-based OS has it, not that long ago (3 months of writing)
• SmartOS has the code
• OmniOS too, though it might either yet be disabled your have to update to the latest "bloody" release

Also from what I can share

• illumian is pretty much dead, illumos wiki confirms it, hasn't attracted enough traction (was a Nexenta thing)
• NexentaStor 3.x currently ships an 2010+backports based OpenSolaris base, it can't even handle ZFS features right now.

 

[rs225]

FreeBSD 9.3 now supports this feature.

Also, at least as of FreeBSD 9.3, you can create a v28 pool by zpool create -o version=28 mypool ...
And, you can create a v5000 pool with all features disabled with zpool create -d mypool ...

From there, you can manually enable features you want, but do remember that some features can't be turned back off, so don't turn on anything without reading man zpool-features first to see if a feature (and anything it depends upon) can be turned back off.

WARNING: If you do zpool upgrade (from v28, etc), every feature gets turned on! This means you need to use the most limited OS you need to interop with to do the upgrade. Since there appear to be changes in zfs send/recv, you also need to consider whether certain pools need to be upgraded together.

 

[cyberjock]

Great, thanks for the info rs225. But that applies to FreeBSD and NOT FreeNAS. You create a pool in FreeNAS and it will be v5000. If you are going to use the CLI you are going to get whipped with a wet noodle because that is not only not recommended its not even supported.

Things that apply to FreeBSD do *not* always apply to FreeNAS and vice versa.

 

[iamtyce]

This is so incredibly frustrating.. just spent the day setting up Ubuntu 14 to migrate away from FreeNAS only to find that my ZFS volume won't work in Ubuntu due to those feature flags.

 

[cyberjock]

Well, it looks like ZFS on linux has merged it back on Feb 27th. The question is whether it's in the stable code or not. I don't know and as I don't really track what the ZFS on linux project is doing all I can say is "not a problem we can solve on this forum". Sounds like you are stuck using FreeNAS until you can either move your data out of the pool or can successfully import the pool in linux.

 

[cyberjock]

Actually, it looks like they are struggling to implement it...

https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/pull/2149

Started Feb 27th, but have comments as recent as 6 days ago.

So it sounds like the ZFS on Linux devs and their release cycle are having some conflicts. Can't say I'm too surprised. All I've heard is they are overworked, understaffed and underresourced for the project. So they're a little behind. Either wait for them to catch up to us or choose to avoid ZFS on Linux. :p

Keep in mind when 9.3 comes out FreeNAS may support flags you don't know of yet. So if you do a zpool upgrade in 9.3 you may start this whole "wait" cycle all over again.