ZFS Features - shall i activate them?

rakurtz

Member
Jan 23, 2021
31
5
8
Germany
Hello guys,

on my Proxmox Nodes i ran across the notification about not enabled features and the backend suggested to run zpool upgrade on it. What do you think about it? Is it safe to active those? The only software accessing the pool ist Proxmox itself.

Code:
root@system:~# zpool upgrade
This system supports ZFS pool feature flags.

All pools are formatted using feature flags.


Some supported features are not enabled on the following pools. Once a
feature is enabled the pool may become incompatible with software
that does not support the feature. See zpool-features(5) for details.

POOL  FEATURE
---------------
data
      redaction_bookmarks
      redacted_datasets
      bookmark_written
      log_spacemap
      livelist
      device_rebuild
      zstd_compress
 
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Reactions: franko5
TL;DR: 2.0.x is the first OpenZFS release branch to include these feature flags, you can check out the OpenZFS documentation on feature flags. It also includes a feature matrix. While (by my experience) OpenZFS developers have rather high quality standard new features, it boils down to if you need this these features to be enabled or if it enables something nice you really want to check out.

Check out the manpage 'zpool-features' on your system, the feature flags are all listed and quickly explained. The main obvious disadvantage hower is: Should you encounter issues and have the need to downgrade to an older Proxmox release, you cannot import the pool with these feature flags enabled, it is a one-way street.

But from my point of view device_rebuild and and log_spacemap do look attractive for my own use case. :)
 

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