Migrating ZFS on Linux pools to FreeBSD

Anders Jensen-Waud anders at jensenwaud.com
Sun Feb 7 04:29:57 UTC 2016



> On 4 Feb 2016, at 11:01, Ruben Schade <newsgroups at rubenschade.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi everyone,
> 
> I'm migrating a home HP Gen8 Microserver from Debian Jessie to FreeBSD 10.2. I have two mirrored ZFS pools created with the ZFS on Linux port, and want to access them on FreeBSD.
> 
> I understand FreeBSD's ZFS implementation is more mature and pre-dates the Linux port, and some web searches indicate the two may not be entirely compatible. Most recommendations seem to be not to run Linux and FreeBSD off the same pools, for example:
> 
> https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/installing-freebsd-in-an-existing-zfs-pool.54831/
> 
> Does the same hold true for just data stores, and ones that are being migrated over without being accessed by Linux again? Are there any practical limitations to just using a ZFS pool created on Linux?

Technically no, but I would boot a FreeBSD live CD first and import / attach the pool. Generally, ZFS on Linux is typically a few feature flags behind FreeBSD, so there shouldn't be any issues with doing this.
> 
> If there’s reasonable doubt of issues I'll just rebuilt the pools under FreeBSD, but would be great if I didn't need to do that. It'd be cool if it’s just a # zpool upgrade away hah :)

That should do the trick, but bear in mind it will be hard (read: impossible) to go the other way once upgraded. 

Anders 

> 
> Cheers,
> 
> -- 
> Cheers,
> Ruben Schade in s/Singapore/Sydney/
> https://rubenerd.com/
> 
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