[illumos-Developer] [osol-discuss] zpool upgrade and zfs upgrade behavior on b145

[Chris Mosetick]

Hi Cindy,

I did see your first email pointing to that
bug<http://bugs.opensolaris.org/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=6538600>.
Apologies for not addressing it earlier.  It is my opinion that the behavior
Mike, and I <http://illumos.org/issues/217> (or anyone else upgrading pools
right now) is seeing is a entirely new and different bug.  The bug you point
to, originally submitted in 2007 says it manifests itself before a reboot.
Also you say exporting and importing clear the problem.  After several
reboots, zdb still shows the older pool version, which means that this is a
new bug or perhaps the bug you are referencing is not listing clearly and
accurately what it should be and is incomplete.

Suppose an export and import can update the pool label config on a large
storage pool, great.  How would someone go about exporting the rpool the
operating system is on??  As far as I know, It's impossible to export the
zpool the operating system is running on.  I don't think it can be done, but
I'm new so maybe I'm missing something.

One option I have not explored that might work:  Booting to a live CD that
has the same or higher pool version present and then doing:   zpool import
&& zpool import -f rpool && zpool export rpool  and then rebooting into the
operating system.  Perhaps this might be an option that "works" to update
the label config / zdb for rpool but I think fixing the root problem would
be much more beneficial for everyone in the long run.  Being that zdb is a
troubleshooting/debugging tool, I would think that it's necessary for it to
be aware of the proper pool version to work properly and so admins know
what's really going on with their pools.  The bottom line here is that if
zdb is going to be part of zfs, it needs to display what is currently on
disk, including the label config.  If I were an admin thinking about
trusting hundreds of GB's of data to zfs I would want the debugger to show
me whats really on the disks.

Additionally, even though zpool and zfs "get version" display the true and
updated versions, I'm not convinced that the problem is zdb, as the label
config is almost certainly set by the zpool and/or zfs commands.  Somewhere,
something is not happening that is supposed to when initiating a zpool
upgrade, but since I know virtually nothing of the internals of zfs, I do
not know where.

Sincerely,

-Chris
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