I have had ClusterHQ's partial stable ABI in Gentoo's packaging since December (which helped to shake out bugs) and have just done another update of it with various bug fixes, including many from HEAD. Some might notice that merging a pull request that isn't fully reviewed is a fairly big departure from the rigorous vetting that I did on patches to ensure that every update was absolutely bug free. I had a good span of about 3 years without Gentoo specific regressions that I can recall. While I did my best to avoid introducing regressions in Gentoo's ZoL packaging, the /dev/zfs ABI has been unstable. That allowed for potential upgrade pains such as 0.6.2 -> 0.6.3 where those with mismatched modules and userspace code had problems. All ZoL packaging in Gentoo has been marked as "testing" because of it. The partial stable ABI presents offers an opportunity to change this such that users will have the option of either stable packages (well tested and vetted) or testing packages (vetted by me and pushed out for the community to vet further). In specific, the partial stable ABI should allow the following functions to work whenever mismatches occur, provided that both the userland and kernel code are mismatched using versions after the transition has taken place: - zpool import - zpool iostat - zpool tryimport - zpool export - zpool list - zpool get - zpool status - zfs mount - zfs umount - zfs clone - zfs snapshot - zfs rollback - zfs destroy - zfs create - zfs list - zfs get - zfs set - zfs inherit - zfs send - zfs recv (part of stable API, but not ABI in the current code, plan to resolve in the future) - zfs bookmark - zfs hold - zfs release It also provides convenient functions to control these operations through libzfs_core. The man pages are a draft from a few months ago, but include all of the non-zpool commands. This will be rectified in the near future so that all functions are thoroughly documented. After consulting with a few others, I decided in December to transition Gentoo to this now in the belief that the long term benefits outweigh the short term pain of the transition. Specifically, I want to exchange all of the pain the /dev/zfs ABI being unstable will cause over years for a brief period of pain now. Having any pain at all is not ideal, but this is the first time we have had a plan to ensure that this will be the last time (for the subset I mentioned, things outside of it will likely be added in the future based on need/importance). Doing an update today to fix the regressions that were reported has given me the opportunity to reflect on how I have handled things since the December update. At present, I am working on multiple things and while it is hard to keep track of every issue, I would like to minimize the amount of pain that occurs during this transition. My plan is to complete the transition by marking things stable 2 weeks after I stop hearing reports of regressions. If there are any regressions I have missed, I would like to hear about them. Please contact me in #zfsonlinux on the freenode IRC network so that I can resolve it ASAP. That way the regression can cut in line in my queue and be handled faster than the regressions I missed prior to the December code push. Having said that, those on other distributions are welcome to the code and to contact me about issues (please ping through freenode for the fastest response). It can be found on github: https://github.com/ryao/zfs/commits/gentoo-zfs-0.6.5.3-release https://github.com/ryao/spl/commits/gentoo-spl-0.6.5.3-release Tarballs of patches can be found here: http://dev.gentoo.org/~ryao/dist/zfs-0.6.5.3-patches-p1.tar.xz SHA256: 765a66adf67d0a3ae6a699561b98a5158d464e3b6ed413a72bdbbe6e6252ba66 SHA1: 56079ecd2543c44191cd747ce28a28a2bab8c064 MD5: 0a92dae487f507616e0850ee9760932f http://dev.gentoo.org/~ryao/dist/spl-0.6.5.3-patches-p0.tar.xz SHA256: 8e652d41eba421720bcecee99077d3f3c375153809426011f04a2c64aa181ca7 SHA1: 50cf449d7ba1772b967446bad7c12ac29fee7b6c MD5: 6d3c2fe3bfff26f575120aac623f8dda The ZFS shortlog: AndCycle (1): Obey arc_meta_limit default size when changing arc_max Benjamin Albrecht (1): Activate LVM volume groups before looking for zpools. Brian Behlendorf (15): Fix maybe uninitialized Follow 0/-E convention for module load errors Fix --enable-linux-builtin Use large stacks when available Either _ILP32 or _LP64 must be defined Fix zfsctl_lookup_objset() deadlock Change zfs_snapshot_lock from mutex to rw lock Set 'zfs_expire_snapshot=0' to disable auto-unmount Hold the zfs_snapentry_t before dispatch Handle block pointers with a corrupt logical size Handle damaged blk_birth in dsl_deadlist_insert() Fix vdev_queue_aggregate() deadlock Fix zfs_vdev_aggregation_limit bounds checking Fix ztest truncated cache file Fix z_xattr_lock/z_teardown_lock inversion Chunwei Chen (11): Fix fail path in zfs_znode_alloc Fix snapshot automount behavior when concurrent or fail Linux 4.4 compat: make_request_fn returns blk_qc_t Linux 4.4 compat: xattr operations takes xattr_handler Fix zdb calling behavior in ztest Fix zdb_dump_block on little endian systems Use spa as key besides objsetid for snapentry Fix snapshot automount race cause EREMOTE Fix uio_prefaultpages for 0 length iovec Fix empty xattr dir causing lockup Make xattr dir truncate and remove in one tx DHE (1): libzfs: handle EDOM errors Jason Zaman (1): sysmacros: Make P2ROUNDUP not trigger int overflow Kamil Domański (1): Skip GPL-only symbols test when cross-compiling Ned Bass (1): Prevent SA length overflow Olaf Faaland (1): Remove "index" column from dbufstat.py Richard Yao (5): ClusterHQ Proposed API extensions Only trigger SET_ERROR tracepoint event on error Unconditionally build zdb and ztest with -DDEBUG Revert "Switch ztest mmap(2) ASSERTs to VERIFYs" Refresh ClusterHQ Proposed API extensions against ZoL PR Turbo Fredriksson (1): Unmount is part of the shutdown process, not the boot process. tuxoko (3): Fix null pointer in arc_kmem_reap_now on 32-bit Fix zfs_dirty_data_max overflow on 32-bit Prevent rm modules.* when make install The SPL shortlog: Brian Behlendorf (1): Fix --enable-linux-builtin Chunwei Chen (1): Don't call kmem_cache_shrink from shrinker Dimitri John Ledkov (1): spl-kmem-cache: include linux/prefetch.h for prefetchw() Jason Zaman (1): sysmacros: Make P2ROUNDUP not trigger int overflow Richard Yao (2): Fix race between getf() and areleasef() Make taskq_member() use ->journal_info tuxoko (2): Fix taskq dynamic spawning Prevent rm modules.* when make install