grow zpool on a mirror setup

[George Mamalakis]

Hello everybody,

I have asked the same question in the freebsd forums, but had no luck. 
Apart of this, there might be a bug somewhere, so I re-ask the question 
to this list. Here how it goes (three posts):

post 1:

"I am experimenting with one installation of FreeBSD-9-STABLE/amd64 on a 
VirtualBox that is using gptzfsboot on a raid-1 (mirrored) zfs pool. My 
problem is that I need to grow the filesystem size of zfs partitions. I 
followed this guide 
<http://support.freenas.org/ticket/342>(http://support.freenas.org/ticket/342), 
which is for FreeNAS, and encountered a few problems.

# gpart show
=>      34  40959933  ada0  GPT  (19G)
         34       128     1  freebsd-boot  (64k)
        162  35651584     2  freebsd-zfs  (17G)
   35651746   5308221     3  freebsd-swap  (2.5G)

=>      34  40959933  ada1  GPT  (19G)
         34       128     1  freebsd-boot  (64k)
        162  35651584     2  freebsd-zfs  (17G)
   35651746   5308221     3  freebsd-swap  (2.5G)

# zpool status
   pool: zroot
  state: ONLINE
   scan: resilvered 912M in 1h3m with 0 errors on Sat Mar 10 14:01:17 2012
config:

         NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
         zroot       ONLINE       0     0     0
           mirror-0  ONLINE       0     0     0
             ada0p2  ONLINE       0     0     0
             ada1p2  ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

# zpool list
NAME    SIZE  ALLOC   FREE    CAP  DEDUP  HEALTH  ALTROOT
zroot  5.97G  3.69G  2.28G    61%  1.00x  ONLINE  -

Let me give you a few info with regard to my setup, before explaining my 
problems:
As you can see, *gpart* shows that my ada0p2 and ada1p2 partitions (used 
in zroot) are of size 17G, while *zfs list* shows that zroot has a size 
of 5.97G (which is the initial size of the virtual machine's disks, 
before I resized them).

The problem I encountered when following the aforementioned procedure, 
was that I was unable to export zroot (the procedure says to export the 
pool, "resize" the paritions with *gparted*, and then import the pool), 
because I was receiving a message of some of my filesystems being busy 
(in single user mode, "/" was busy). Thus, in order to resolve this 
issue, I booted with a CDROM of FreeBSD 9 RELEASE, I then imported 
(*-f*) my zpool, and followed the procedure of resizing my filesystems.

Does anyone have a better idea as to what I should do in order to make 
*zpool* see all the available space of the partitions it is using?

Thank you all for your time in advance,

mamalos"

post 2:

"Ah,

and not to forget: I have enabled the autoexpand property of *zpool* (to 
be honest I've enabled, disabled, reenabled, and so forth many times, 
because somewhere I read that it might be needed, sometimes...), with no 
luck."

post 3:

"Since nobody has an answer that far, let me ask another thing. Instead 
of deleting ada0p2 and ada1p2, and then recreating them from the same 
starting block but with a grater size, could I have just created two new 
filesystems (ada0p3 and ada1p3), and having them added in the pool as a 
new mirror? Because if that's the case, then I could try that out, since 
it seems to have the same result.

Not that this answers to my question, but at least it's a workaround. "

As stated in these posts, it's really strange that zpool list doesn't 
seem to react even if I set the expand flag (or autoexpand which is the 
same), hence my concern whether this could be a bug.

Thank you all for your time,

-- 
George Mamalakis

IT and Security Officer
Electrical and Computer Engineer (Aristotle Un. of Thessaloniki),
MSc (Imperial College of London)

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Faculty of Engineering
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

phone number : +30 (2310) 994379