zpool import on FreeBSD 8 failing, zdb/FreeBSD claiming corrupt GPT labels, zdb/Solaris b117 reports everything's fine

[Rich]

Hi questioners,

I wanted to test ZFS support for a 10-disk RAID-Z2 pool I have under
FreeBSD 8, as I found Solaris 11 too unstable for my needs.

One disk in the pool is faulted, and is physically not connected to
the machine at the moment. The remaining 9 (plus one slog device) are
attached, and the entire disk is used on each.

I installed FreeBSD 8.0-BETA2 AMD64 on a clean disk, and after
rebooting into my new install, ran zpool import. "No pools available"
greeted me. (Well, a message about the CDDL module being loaded and
about prefetch being disabled as the system has 2GB RAM greeted me,
followed by "No pools available".)

The arcmsr CLI utility reports all disks connected (in JBOD). (The
card is an ARC-1280ML, with disks attached via SAS-4i -> 4x SATA2
cables.)

I'm using arcmsr in JBOD mode, so I asked zdb -l /dev/da0 ... zdb -l
/dev/da10 what they thought. All four said they saw no meaningful
labels on the disks.

fdisk /dev/da0 ... da10 reported that the GPT labels are corrupt  or
otherwise unreadable uniformly across all disks. I'm presuming this
has something to do with feeding ZFS the entire disk and not just a
slice of it.

Fascinatingly, under SXCE b117, all of the disk labels (all four for
each disk) in question are quite readable with zdb -l [dev], leading
me to believe something's rotten in the state of Denmark.

Is this some known caveat with FreeBSD+ZFS? I can't seem to find any
documentation for ZFS on FreeBSD 8.

Thanks for anything you can offer,
- Rich Ercolani

-- 

The sooner you fall behind, the more time you have to catch up.