FreeBSD 13/stable and zpool upgrade

[Warner Losh]

On Fri, Feb 19, 2021 at 11:24 AM Kurt Jaeger <pi at freebsd.org> wrote:

> Hi!
>
> > > Unfortunately it contains an old version of the boot loader:
> [...]
> > We should be better about upgrading boot blocks, but EFI is kinda new and
> > kinda different than the other out-of-root-filesystem boot blocks we've
> had
> > in the past, so there's still some rough edges.
>
> We run many systems at remote sites. If we can't remotely upgrade
> without drama from 12.x to 13.x, that would be a catastrophe.
>
> Any chance this can be fixed before 13.0-REL ?
>

You can upgrade to 13 w/o hassle. The upgrade process doesn't automatically
upgrade the zpools. The only problem is if you also do a 'zpool upgrade'
which will change your zpool features. The fix is easy: upgrade your boot
loader (bootx64.efi) on the ESP at the same time before rebooting...

There's nothing really to fix here. All the code is there. It all works.
The upgrade is fail safe up until the point you do the zpool upgrade, which
has to be done by the system administrator. It's not done in the installer
or as part of 'make installworld'.

Warner