Problem with zfsloader on 9.2-BETA2

[Trond Endrestøl]

On Wed, 31 Jul 2013 03:49-0400, J David wrote:

> In order to test ZFS on the upcoming 9.2 release, we upgraded a
> non-production 8.4 root-on-ZFS fileserver to 9.2-BETA2.
> 
> The result was a non-bootable system.  The first problem was
> gptzfsboot, but that was our fault? it never got upgraded when we
> switched to feature flags.  So some time with the 8.4 live CD (the 9.x
> CD's do not boot on this system -- kern/162160 ) solved that.
> 
> But the system still wouldn't boot, moving on to:
> 
> ZFS: can't find pool by guid
> ZFS: can't find pool by guid
> 
> We got around this by interrupting the stage1 loader and invoking
> data/root:/boot/zfsloader.old instead.  Then we moved the 9.2
> zfsloader out of the way and restored the 8.4 loader.
> 
> So this system only boots with the 9.2 gptzfsboot and the 8.4 zfsloader.
> 
> To the best of my knowledge, there is nothing broken or out of date
> with this zpool:
> 
> $ zpool status
>   pool: data
>  state: ONLINE
>   scan: resilvered 451G in 70h36m with 0 errors on Fri Feb 17 00:26:19 2012
> config:
> 
> 	NAME          STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
> 	data          ONLINE       0     0     0
> 	  raidz2-0    ONLINE       0     0     0
> 	    da2p1     ONLINE       0     0     0
> 	    da3p1     ONLINE       0     0     0
> 	    da4p1     ONLINE       0     0     0
> 	    da5p1     ONLINE       0     0     0
> 	    da6p1     ONLINE       0     0     0
> 	    da7p1     ONLINE       0     0     0
> 	logs
> 	  gpt/slog0   ONLINE       0     0     0
> 	cache
> 	  gpt/cache1  ONLINE       0     0     0
> 
> errors: No known data errors
> $ zpool upgrade
> This system supports ZFS pool feature flags.
> 
> All pools are formatted using feature flags.
> 
> Every feature flags pool has all supported features enabled.
> 
> 
> Does anyone know why the 9.2 zfsloader won't load it?
> 
> Thanks!

I'm curious as to why you use da?p1 as the freebsd-zfs partitions.
Where does the freebsd-boot partition reside? da?p2?

What does the "gpart show" command tell you?

I normally use *p1 for freebsd-boot, *p2 for freebsd-swap and *p3 for 
freebsd-swap. I know some people who put freebsd-zfs on *p2 and 
freebsd-swap on *p3. Maybe the partitions are interchangeable after 
all.

As a general rule, I think it's wise to always update the boot blocks 
whenever you plan to upgrade the pool format or the filesystems.

If I have the time later this afternoon, or maybe tomorrow, I will 
attempt the following on a couple of VMs:

1. Install 8.4-RELEASE with ZFS SPA v28.

2. Upgrade ZFS SPA to v5000. Updating the boot blocks shouldn't be 
necessary this time.

3. Upgrade by source to 8.4-STABLE and see what happens then.

4. Upgrade by source to 9.2-BETA2, and possibly update the boot blocks 
using the installed files prior to rebooting, and see what 
happens then.

A second attempt would involve going straight from 8.4-RELEASE to 
9.2-BETA2.

I'll let you know how well I fared.

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