openzfs
'zpool status' gives confusing suggestion with 'zpool upgrade'
System information
| Type | Version/Name |
|---|---|
| Distribution Name | Ubuntu |
| Distribution Version | 24.04 |
| Kernel Version | 6.8.0 |
| Architecture | amd64 |
| OpenZFS Version | 2.2.2 |
Describe the problem you're observing
When running 'zpool status' I get this 'output' message:
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.
Running 'zpool upgrade' just shows the features, but it does not upgrade them to the pool.
This is a bit confusing as the message states 'Enable using all features using...' - it is not clear that user should either issue zpool upgrade -a or zpool upgrade <poolname>.
Googling a bit about it I see that people often do get confused by this (some examples): https://www.reddit.com/r/zfs/comments/lpd3x3/zpool_status_enable_all_features_using_zpool/ https://forums.unraid.net/topic/171622-zpool-upgrade-and-still-some-supported-and-requested-features-are-not-enabled-on-the-pool/
Describe how to reproduce the problem
Run 'zpool status' on a pool where features are not applied to a pool.
Shouldn't output of 'zpool status' be more descriptive, saying something like:
Enable all features using 'zpool upgrade <poolname>'. ?
Recently I had my first-time hands-on ZFS experience, when two disks showed "SMART Failure Predicted on SATA6G_*" on our office proxmox server. I attached 2 new drives to the pool, did re-silvering and detached the old ones. Then I wanted to apply 'zpool upgrade', as advised by 'zpool status'.
Running 'zpool upgrade' just showed me some not-enabled features. So I started to google what are these features for, but then I thought I'll ask AI for a quick recap on each feature and how to enable them.
Long story short even GPT-5 was confused and it recommended me some non-existing option for enabling only selected features and avoiding the less used ones 😃
zpool upgrade zroot is what I envisioned, which enables all features except those marked with (*). Running zpool upgrade alone simply lists the available features and does not actually upgrade them. I believe clarifying this point is very important. Because of this confusing explanation, I ended up going in circles for an hour between zpool upgrade, zpool status, and reboot.
