Description Kurt Lidl 2016-10-21 14:45:03 UTC

A friend who upgraded a system from 10.3, which previously ran various 10.x
releases, and was originally installed probably as a 9.0 system.

Always upgraded via freebsd-release.

Anyhow - successfully upgrade to 11.0 Release, and commented that two items
that were not documented in the release notes that probably should be
noted for people planning to upgrade.

Both issues are ZFS related:

1) The new support for sha512 and skein checksums in a zpool was not
   documented.  This is important in that 'zpool status' (after upgrading)
   will complain that the zpool version is out of date until
   'zpool upgrade -a' is run.

   A possible improvement to the code (outside the scope of this issue), would
   be to have a mechanism to have the acknowledge of the feature, but warning
   suppression.

   If the user DOES do a 'zpool upgrade -a', they then need to install fresh
   bootblocks.  Which leads to item #2...

2) The increased size of the /boot/gptzfsloader in 11.0 vs prior releases.
   The machine in question was installed probably with 9.0, when the 'best
   practices' was to have a 64k boot partition.  Well, the gptzfsloader code
   is now ~88K, and does not fit in the existing partition.

   A warning about potentially needing a bigger freebsd-boot partition is
   required for people upgrading older releases, least they upgrade their
   zpool and then be stuck without the ability to upgrade their bootblocks.

   (As it turns out the user was able to reclaim a 'gap' in the partitioning
   and get the bootblocks upgraded without having to reload the system from
   scratch.)