Clarify GRUB's lack of support for sha512, skein, edonr

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.

Reviewed-by: George Melikov <mail@gmelikov.ru>
Reviewed-by: Brian Behlendorf <behlendorf1@llnl.gov>
Signed-off-by: Richard Laager <rlaager@wiktel.com>
Closes #8626
Closes #8446

diff --git a/man/man5/zpool-features.5 b/man/man5/zpool-features.5
index a5cf7a9ede62e7c97fd16a33012ef82d20a9b825..2ab74f19b97d7c7b236dfc234b746d4ccb34f7bd 100644 (file)
--- a/man/man5/zpool-features.5
+++ b/man/man5/zpool-features.5
@@ -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
 
@@ -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
 
@@ -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
 

diff --git a/man/man8/zfs.8 b/man/man8/zfs.8
index d475df65015d01f9d8f3ebfe1c077f540e430f3b..eaa98212f18cdcf0296b284d8f42f497d0d3776e 100644 (file)
--- a/man/man8/zfs.8
+++ b/man/man8/zfs.8
@@ -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.