Re: zpool import lossage

[Lloyd Parkes <lloyd%must-have-coffee.gen.nz@localhost>]

This is all off the top of my head and while I use ZFS almost daily, not 
on NetBSD :-(, it's been a few years since I poked at the internals.

Your action of creating a symlink seems like a reasonable 
workaround/solution to your issue. You should be able to create the 
symlink in any directory and tell zfs import which directory to use.

ZFS generally expects to use a whole GPT labelled disk and so I expect 
that BSD labelled partitions are not checked. Since almost everyone 
starts with ZFS by doing exactly what you did, adding information to the 
wiki is a good idea.

I think that /etc/zfs is used for maintaining certain system state 
information about imported pools across reboots and so I'm not overly 
surprised to see that it is empty after you exported the pool. It might 
just optimise the boot time import of the pool.

Cheers

On 17/02/21 2:39 pm, Greg Troxel wrote:
> (I'm testing on 9, but am guessing this is similar on current and will
> if anywhere be fixed there and not necessarily pulled up to 9.)
>
> I'm starting to try out zfs.   So far I don't have any data that
> matters.
>
> On a 1T SSD I have wd0[abe] as root/swap/usr as an unremarkable netbsd-9
> system, on an unremarkable amd64 desktop with 8G of RAM.
>
> I created pool1 with wd0f, which is the rest of the 1T disk, about 850G,
> not raid of any kind.  I created a few filesystems, changed their mount
> points, changed their options, and mounted one over NFS from another
> machine, and all seemed ok.  (Yes, I realize the doctrine that "use the
> whole disk as a zfs component" is the preferred approach.)
>
> I wanted to rename my pool from pool1 to tank0, for no good reason,
> mostly trying to do all the scary things while the only data I had was a
> pkgsrc checkout, but partly having seen Stephen Borrill's report of
> import trouble.
>
> So I did
>
>    zpool export pool1
>
> and sure enough all my zfs stuff was gone.
>
> Then I did, per the man page:
>
>    zpool import
>
> and nothing was found.  After a bunch of reading and ktracing, I
> realized that there is no record of the pool in /etc/zfs or anywhere
> else I could find, and the notion is that zpool import will somehow find
> all the disks that have zfs data on them, apparently by opening all
> disks and looking for some kind of ZFSMAGIC.  But it looked at wd0 and
> not the slices.  There was no apparent way to ask it to look at wd0f
> specifically.  So I did
>
>    cd /dev; rm wd0; ln -s wd0f wd0
>
> which is icky, but then zpool import found wd0f and I could
>
>    zpool import pool1 tank0
>
> So this feels like a significant bug, and matches Stephen Borrill's
> report.  I think we're heading to documenting this in the wiki, or at
> least I am.
>
> Does anything think I have this wrong?
> Is anyone inclined to do anything more serious?