ZFS Bogosity

["Jay F. Shachter" <jay%m5.chicago.il.us@localhost>]

Esteemed Colleagues:

I have a multiboot computer on which Solaris, Linux, and NetBSD 10
BETA have all been successfully installed (I couldn't install NetBSD
9.3) and they are all sharing storage on a ZFS pool, because all three
of those operating systems support, or can be make to support, ZFS.

I created a ZFS pool in /dev/wd0m (more precisely, I created a ZFS
pool on Linux, in /dev/sda16, in an area on the disk that I
subsequently defined on NetBSD to be /dev/wd0m).  When I typed

  zpool import m5

on NetBSD, the zpool command did not find it.  When I typed

  zpool import -d /dev m5

the zpool command still did not find it.  However, when I typed

  mkdir /dev/z
  ln /dev/wd0m /dev/z/wd0m
  zpool import -d /dev/z m5

then the zpool command found it.

This is, of course, utterly bogus.  Or, to say the same thing in more
formal language, I consider this to be a bug, unless it is documented,
in which case, it is not a bug, it is a feature.

Now, I truly understand that no one on this mailing list is a paying
customer, and that the correct answer to someone who complains "NetBSD
isn't implementing this right" is "then you go and implement it
right."  So I am not complaining.  I am just -- without complaining --
pointing out an existing bogosity, in case it catches the interest of
some reader of this mailing list who has the desire and the
wherewithal to fix it.

                        Jay F. Shachter
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