I have an UnRAID box with a zpool that consists of 7 total disks.  4 are spinning rust, 3 are NVME.  The three NVME drives each contain 3 partitions.  Those partitions are built into 3-way mirrors across all three drive, one mirror each for special, log, and cache.  I have L2ARC persistence enabled.  The spinning rust disks are LUKS encrypted.

In UnRAID versions 7.0 and older, this configuration isn't understood and starting the array halts after unlocking the LUKS encrypted drives.  Certainly a nuisance as I can't autostart, but navigable with a zpool import and restart of docker and libvirt (or not if you issue the zpool import at the right time after starting the array).

Then along comes UnRAID 7.1.0 and the "ability to import zpools from other platforms"...  Problem is, UnRAID still has no clue how to handle assignment of anything other than an entire disk to one of its "slots".  I upgrade, it imports the fact that the pool has mirror devices with vdevs each for special, cache, and log and then proceeds to faceplant because it can't understand that the vdevs are made up of partitions, not entire physical drives.  As a result, no way to start the array so rollback it is...

In order to get back to an operational system, I had to roll back to 7.0 and remove the configs for special, cache, and log under /boot/config/pools.

Until UnRAID FULLY supports zpool configurations that are valid in ANY other platform, it shouldn't be importing them or claiming that it can.  When will partitions be supported in addition to allocation of entire physical disks?  This half-baked ZFS implementation (as far as the UnRAID UI properly supporting ZFS goes) has existed for far too long.

Edited May 8, 20251 yr by Keliaxx

Only one partition per device is currently supported, not sure if/when LT plans to support multiple partitions, the main change to support other platforms was made to be able to import TrueNAS pools, and TrueNAS doesn't have a way to create multiple partitions on devices using the GUI, of course you can do it manually, and TN will import it, but it's not officially supported or even recommended.

 

 

3 minutes ago, JorgeB said:

TrueNAS pools, and TrueNAS doesn't have a way to create multiple partitions on devices using the GUI, of course you can do it manually, and TN will import it, but it's not officially supported or even recommended.

TrueNAS is only a port of a port. The real origin is Solaris 11, which does not exist anymore. The next sibling was FreeBSD from which TrueNAS and others derived it.

And, as usual, ports are never really complete. The more they copy, the more gets lost.

 

Crossing from BSD to Linux gives a lot of troubles because their Kernels differ a lot and not all features are available. The Linux strategy was to implement new stuff fast, BSD is more conservative, it tries to be back-compatible as long as it goes.

 

Therefor there are always some missing structures/function calls or something and a cross-implementer has to make compromises to get things running.

 

Often then they skip complicated stuff ("we will implement this later..." and it never happens) and if then later on others take this work to port it again, they dont even know anymore that something essential is missing.

So, it is not really a surprise that "ZFS on UNRAID" is far from beeing a real ZFS.

 

But, if people can live with it, who cares?

 

Not supporting the creation of a configuration in the GUI is one thing, actively breaking something is a completely different story.  If the upgrade to 7.1.0 couldn't properly import the ZFS configuration and support it, it should have just left it alone, not created some garbage configuration that required rollback and manual intervention with the config files to get back to an operational state.  I'm glad everyone is pointing at TrueNAS because that is a good example of the right way to handle this sort of situation.  The UI may not be there to build a ZFS pool this way, but it doesn't create a mess that prevents a simple ZFS import from working.  While we're at it, consider importing from QNAP.  Everything ZFS on that platform is done with multiple partitions per disk.

Bottom line is pretty simple...  If LT doesn't want to build out the UI to fully support ZFS, no problem.  Just don't make claims about being able to support or import things that the product is unable to handle and, more importantly, don't perform actions on things that the product doesn't understand.  The very first order of business in storage products is DO NO HARM.  It seems that is sorely forgotten.
 

Edited May 8, 20251 yr by Keliaxx

2 hours ago, Keliaxx said:

It seems that is sorely forgotten.

I would more think they did not even know about the possible combinations (yet).

But anyway, it should be clear that UNRAID is still far away from a proper ZFS implementation.

 

(BTW: the marketing division only tells that UNRAID is now capable of importing "many" foreign ZFS pools. They never have said that they can be used afterwards :-))) )

 

On 5/8/2025 at 1:43 AM, Keliaxx said:

I have an UnRAID box with a zpool that consists of 7 total disks.  4 are spinning rust, 3 are NVME.  The three NVME drives each contain 3 partitions.  Those partitions are built into 3-way mirrors across all three drive, one mirror each for special, log, and cache.  I have L2ARC persistence enabled.  The spinning rust disks are LUKS encrypted.

In UnRAID versions 7.0 and older, this configuration isn't understood and starting the array halts after unlocking the LUKS encrypted drives.  Certainly a nuisance as I can't autostart, but navigable with a zpool import and restart of docker and libvirt (or not if you issue the zpool import at the right time after starting the array).

Then along comes UnRAID 7.1.0 and the "ability to import zpools from other platforms"...  Problem is, UnRAID still has no clue how to handle assignment of anything other than an entire disk to one of its "slots".  I upgrade, it imports the fact that the pool has mirror devices with vdevs each for special, cache, and log and then proceeds to faceplant because it can't understand that the vdevs are made up of partitions, not entire physical drives.  As a result, no way to start the array so rollback it is...

In order to get back to an operational system, I had to roll back to 7.0 and remove the configs for special, cache, and log under /boot/config/pools.

Until UnRAID FULLY supports zpool configurations that are valid in ANY other platform, it shouldn't be importing them or claiming that it can.  When will partitions be supported in addition to allocation of entire physical disks?  This half-baked ZFS implementation (as far as the UnRAID UI properly supporting ZFS goes) has existed for far too long.

Hi, I'm in a similar situation. What was your solution? Did you just keep using 7.0? That’s a bit of a nuisance because of the ZFS version that 7.0 provides, but I’ll manage. Did you find any workaround? I can import the ZFS pool manually without any problem, but then nothing else in the Unraid GUI recognizes it. Having to manage everything manually kind of defeats the purpose of running Unraid... sigh...

Still only one partition per device is supported when using the GUI, AFAIK there are no plans to change that in the near future.

Well, honestly, after looking more closely at what’s missing or not, it’s really not a big deal. ZFS Master gives me a much better overview of sizes than unRAID does, since I can see the size of each dataset individually. unRAID’s share management still works fine, so not supporting partitions feels a bit shortsighted or maybe just an oversight. I mean, there are only so many NVMe slots and SATA ports available… c’mon.

I personally prefer the benefits of having mirrored NVMe partitions and special vdevs available for my pools.

But honestly, guys, at least consider adding an option to display a manually imported ZFS pool and just show it as-is.

Having a “Format” option with a checkbox and just one click standing between me and total data destruction is a pretty scary sight, lol.

Edited October 9, 2025Oct 9 by adolfotregosa