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Clarify GRUB's lack of support for sha512, skein, edonr
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zfs.8 correctly said that GRUB did not support them, but
zpool-features.5 said that "Booting off pools...is supported."  Now,
zpool-features.5 discusses GRUB specifically and indicates its lack of
support for these features.  Also, I have clarified the wording in both
places to indicate that the pool feature cannot be used.  It's not a
filesystem dataset thing, but pool-wide.

I described this as "cannot be used".  I think technically the feature
can be enabled, just not active.  However, the effect is essentially the
same: you cannot enable those checksum algorithms on any dataset in the
pool, so you might as well not enable the feature (which is just
pointing a loaded gun at your foot).  In the past, an argument could be
made that having all the features enabled was useful for simplicity, as
long as you didn't activate the GRUB-incompatible features, but that's
getting less and less realistic over time.  A user can still do that,
but we should not encourage that.

Signed-off-by: Richard Laager <rlaager@wiktel.com>
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rlaager committed Apr 15, 2019
1 parent 35bec6e commit 6194bdb
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Showing 2 changed files with 9 additions and 6 deletions.
9 changes: 6 additions & 3 deletions man/man5/zpool-features.5
Expand Up @@ -598,7 +598,8 @@ can turn on the \fBsha512\fR checksum on any dataset using
and will return to being \fBenabled\fR once all filesystems that have
ever had their checksum set to \fBsha512\fR are destroyed.

Booting off of pools utilizing SHA-512/256 is supported.
The \fBsha512\fR feature is not supported by GRUB and must not be used on
the pool if GRUB needs to access the pool (e.g. for /boot).

.RE

Expand Down Expand Up @@ -632,7 +633,8 @@ can turn on the \fBskein\fR checksum on any dataset using
and will return to being \fBenabled\fR once all filesystems that have
ever had their checksum set to \fBskein\fR are destroyed.

Booting off of pools using \fBskein\fR is supported.
The \fBskein\fR feature is not supported by GRUB and must not be used on
the pool if GRUB needs to access the pool (e.g. for /boot).

.RE

Expand Down Expand Up @@ -672,7 +674,8 @@ can turn on the \fBedonr\fR checksum on any dataset using the
and will return to being \fBenabled\fR once all filesystems that have
ever had their checksum set to \fBedonr\fR are destroyed.

Booting off of pools using \fBedonr\fR is supported.
The \fBedonr\fR feature is not supported by GRUB and must not be used on
the pool if GRUB needs to access the pool (e.g. for /boot).

.RE

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6 changes: 3 additions & 3 deletions man/man8/zfs.8
Expand Up @@ -1191,9 +1191,9 @@ The
and
.Sy edonr
checksum algorithms require enabling the appropriate features on the pool.
These algorithms are not supported by GRUB and should not be set on the
.Sy bootfs
filesystem when using GRUB to boot the system.
These pool features are not supported by GRUB and must not be used on the
pool if GRUB needs to access the pool (e.g. for /boot).
.Pp
Please see
.Xr zpool-features 5
for more information on these algorithms.
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