OPNsense Forum

English Forums => General Discussion => Topic started by: hushcoden on July 26, 2026, 02:41:01 PM

Title: Checking the zpool status
Post by: hushcoden on July 26, 2026, 02:41:01 PM
I ran the command /sbin/zpool status
and this is the output
pool: zroot
 state: ONLINE
status: Some supported and requested features are not enabled on the pool.
        The pool can still be used, but some features are unavailable.
action: Enable all features using 'zpool upgrade'. Once this is done,
        the pool may no longer be accessible by software that does not support
        the features. See zpool-features(7) for details.
  scan: resilvered 529M in 00:00:02 with 0 errors on Mon Feb 26 19:03:35 2024
config:

        NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
        zroot       ONLINE       0     0     0
          mirror-0  ONLINE       0     0     0
            ada1p4  ONLINE       0     0     0
            ada0p4  ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors
Do I need to worry for those features not available at all?

Tia.
Title: Re: Checking the zpool status
Post by: Patrick M. Hausen on July 26, 2026, 02:49:41 PM
You can type "zpool upgrade" without naming the pool and you will get a list of the new ZFS features introduced in FreeBSD 15. Then it's yours to decide if you need any of them.

To upgrade the pool, you can use "zpool upgrade zroot".

BUT BUT BUT

IF you decide to upgrade the pool, you MUST also update the boot loader to the one that comes with the current OS or your system will be unbootable.

Background:

New features are introduced to ZFS all the time. To ensure backward compatibility ZFS does not enable any of the new ones for any existing pool. You need a current kernel and a current boot loader to support the latest and greatest version of ZFS with all features enabled.

Hence this message every time the systems finds a pool with an older version of ZFS than the running system would support.

But your OPNsense ran perfectly fine with the previous version of ZFS without these brand new features, right? So need to upgrade you do not. Want to upgrade ... beware of outdated boot loaders.

HTH,
Patrick
Title: Re: Checking the zpool status
Post by: meyergru on July 26, 2026, 02:51:45 PM
Also, if the kernel/zfs implementation was just updated, you cannot use older snapshots if you upgrade the zpool.
Title: Re: Checking the zpool status
Post by: Patrick M. Hausen on July 26, 2026, 03:21:50 PM
Quote from: meyergru on Today at 02:51:45 PMAlso, if the kernel/zfs implementation was just updated, you cannot use older snapshots if you upgrade the zpool.

You mean in the context of OPNsense and boot environments, not ZFS in general, right?

To elaborate: you cannot boot an older boot environment (what the UI calls "snapshots") because that contains an older kernel from before your upgrade which is not compatible with the new ZFS features and won't import the "new" pool.

But of course from a strictly ZFS point of view you can copy an older snapshot to another system, you can mount it, you can copy files from it, etc. Snapshots from a previous ZFS version continue to work as snapshots. But they cannot be bootet, anymore once the pool is upgraded.

N.B. ZFS snapshots are not necessarily boot environments. You can snapshot any dataset, e.g. for backup purposes. Only rarely happens in OPNsense.
Title: Re: Checking the zpool status
Post by: meyergru on July 26, 2026, 03:24:54 PM
Correct, I meant OpnSense "snapshots", not ZFS "snapshots" and that you cannot boot them any more, indeed making them obsolete once you upgrade the pool, even if you upgraded the boot files. While I am at it, I might as well delete my old snapshots right now...

Title: Re: Checking the zpool status
Post by: hushcoden on July 26, 2026, 04:51:21 PM
Thanks, and considering that everything is working fine, there is no need to risk breaking my system :-)
Title: Re: Checking the zpool status
Post by: hushcoden on July 26, 2026, 05:17:26 PM
One more thing: I noticed in the cron section that there are two ZFS-related tasks I can enable: scrub and trim. Should I schedule these to run periodically?
Title: Re: Checking the zpool status
Post by: Patrick M. Hausen on July 26, 2026, 05:19:53 PM
Scrub yes. TRIM yes, if you do bot have autotrim enabled.

zpool get autotrim zroot
Title: Re: Checking the zpool status
Post by: hushcoden on July 26, 2026, 05:22:57 PM
Ok, autotrim is already on, and scrub once a month, or ?
Title: Re: Checking the zpool status
Post by: Patrick M. Hausen on July 26, 2026, 05:25:09 PM
About right.