freebsd stable - Jan 2014 - GPT label for ZFS GPT partitions no longer recognized (Was: New FreeBSD snapshots and virtual machine disk images (20140106 r260369))

On Tue, 7 Jan 2014 21:08-0500, Glen Barber wrote:
> o 10.0-PRERELEASE amd64
> FreeBSD-10.0-PRERELEASE-amd64-20140106-r260369-disc1.iso
I tried the experimental ZFS stuff in bsdinstaller, I chose a mirrored 
pool using 4K disk blocks, and I noticed the zfs0 and zfs1 labels are 
indeed shown when running gpart show -l after the first reboot, but 
only the gptboot{0,1} and swap{0,1} labels shows up in the /dev/gpt 
directory. I guess gnop is doing some mischief to the GPT.

Some weeks ago I did a complete manual ZFS install using my own 
homegrown shell scripts 
(http://ximalas.info/~trond/create-zfs/canmount/), 4K disk blocks and 
mirrored pool, and gnop managed to render the entire GPT invisible on 
the first two harddrives. It could very well be pilot error on my 
part.

Only when rebooting using the snapshot ISO image, the labels showed up 
as expected when running gpart show -l and were even visible in the 
/dev/gpt directory. Luckily, the boot code manages to find its way 
through the maze, but not the installed kernel, which should be the 
very same kernel as found on the snapshot image.

Any thoughts to what's going on? Sorry for the noise if this is ol' 
news.

And by the way, is /usr/local considered part of each BE? I like to 
treat it as global to each BE, very much like /tmp and /var, as long 
as I'm running the same branch in every BE.

-- 
+-------------------------------+------------------------------------+
| Vennlig hilsen,               | Best regards,                      |
| Trond Endrest?l,              | Trond Endrest?l,                   |
| IT-ansvarlig,                 | System administrator,              |
| Fagskolen Innlandet,          | Gj?vik Technical College, Norway,  |
| tlf. mob.   952 62 567,       | Cellular...: +47 952 62 567,       |
| sentralbord 61 14 54 00.      | Switchboard: +47 61 14 54 00.      |
+-------------------------------+------------------------------------+

On Tue, 14 Jan 2014 17:11+0100, Trond Endrest?l wrote:
> On Tue, 7 Jan 2014 21:08-0500, Glen Barber wrote:
> 
> > o 10.0-PRERELEASE amd64
> 
> > FreeBSD-10.0-PRERELEASE-amd64-20140106-r260369-disc1.iso
> 
> I tried the experimental ZFS stuff in bsdinstaller, I chose a mirrored 
> pool using 4K disk blocks, and I noticed the zfs0 and zfs1 labels are 
> indeed shown when running gpart show -l after the first reboot, but 
> only the gptboot{0,1} and swap{0,1} labels shows up in the /dev/gpt 
> directory. I guess gnop is doing some mischief to the GPT.
I did some googling and found out that during the zpool import step of 
the gnop create, zpool create, zpool export, gnop destroy, zpool 
import dance, you should tell ZFS (or actually zpool) to look for 
devices in the /dev/gpt directory, like this:

zpool import -d /dev/gpt -o cachefile=/tmp/zpool.cache zroot

I believe you still need to copy the temporary cachefile to the 
/boot/zfs directory in the BE. Luckily, this treatment doesn't hide 
the /dev/gpt/zfs{0,1} GPT labels after rebooting.

I think it would be better for all of us if 
usr.sbin/bsdinstall/scripts/zfsboot would run zpool import with the -d 
option after destroying the *.nop devices, until the scenario with the 
missing GPT labels is resolved.

Any thoughts?

-- 
+-------------------------------+------------------------------------+
| Vennlig hilsen,               | Best regards,                      |
| Trond Endrest?l,              | Trond Endrest?l,                   |
| IT-ansvarlig,                 | System administrator,              |
| Fagskolen Innlandet,          | Gj?vik Technical College, Norway,  |
| tlf. mob.   952 62 567,       | Cellular...: +47 952 62 567,       |
| sentralbord 61 14 54 00.      | Switchboard: +47 61 14 54 00.      |
+-------------------------------+------------------------------------+