New 14.3-RELEASE amd64 ZFS RAW VM-IMAGE

From: Colin Percival <cperciva_at_freebsd.org>
Date: Sat, 12 Jul 2025 16:44:48 UTC
Hi everyone,

As some of you may be aware, the FreeBSD-14.3-RELEASE-amd64-zfs.raw VM image
which shipped as part of FreeBSD 14.3-RELEASE was broken: A bug in the ZFS
code in makefs resulted in the ZFS filesystem being corrupt and triggering a
kernel panic when part of the filesystem was read (as happens nightly when
"periodic daily" runs).  This bug has been fixed (64e0b2e8f752) but of course
that bug fix landed after the release so it doesn't retroactively fix the VM
image we shipped.

For the benefit of users who want to run ZFS in an amd64 VM and need the "raw"
disk image format, I've converted the "qcow2" image (which had a non-broken
ZFS filesystem) to "raw" format and published it via the usual channels.  So
https://download.freebsd.org/releases/VM-IMAGES/14.3-RELEASE/amd64/Latest/
now contains FreeBSD-14.3-RELEASE-amd64-zfs-rebuilt.raw.xz which has hashes

SHA256 (FreeBSD-14.3-RELEASE-amd64-zfs-rebuilt.raw.xz) = 
b855076013c282b2e4ed9b3dec999b613b116a7978703bea5dccb3187d704ef6
SHA512 (FreeBSD-14.3-RELEASE-amd64-zfs-rebuilt.raw.xz) = 
df1ec8c0125d1e948e4a8c1489ceccd2bfdcddf61229ffc1cba80f9e85bf74ad5f3b578472c8221cb99ad60d49a90d79ab218c6a22cb518675b87b68d168fc54

and that file should suffice for any purposes for which the original
FreeBSD-14.3-RELEASE-amd64-zfs.raw.xz file would have been used.

(I'm not simply replacing the old file, since that would trip up anyone who
is checking hashes against the release announcement; but I removed the broken
file from download.freebsd.org so that nobody accidentally gets a broken VM.
The original broken image can be found on archive.freebsd.org.)

-- 
Colin Percival
FreeBSD Release Engineering Lead & EC2 platform maintainer
Founder, Tarsnap | www.tarsnap.com | Online backups for the truly paranoid