The GRUB restrictions are based around the pool's bootfs property.
Given the current situation where GRUB is not staying current with
OpenZFS pool features, having either a non-ZFS /boot or a separate
pool with limited features are pretty much the only long-term answers
for GRUB support. Only the second case matters in this context. For
the restrictions to be useful, the bootfs property would have to be set
on the boot pool, because that is where we need the restrictions, as
that is the pool that GRUB reads from. The documentation for bootfs
describes it as pointing to the root pool. That's also how it's used in
the initramfs. ZFS does not allow setting bootfs to point to a dataset
in another pool. (If it did, it'd be difficult-to-impossible to enforce
these restrictions cross-pool). Accordingly, bootfs is pretty much
useless for GRUB scenarios moving forward.
Even for users who have only one pool, the existing restrictions for
GRUB are incomplete. They don't prevent you from enabling the
unsupported checksums, for example. For that reason, I have ripped out
all the GRUB restrictions.
A little longer-term, I think extending the proposed features=portable
system to define a features=grub is a much more useful approach. The
user could set that on the boot pool at creation, and things would
Just Work.
Reviewed-by: Paul Dagnelie <pcd@delphix.com>
Reviewed-by: Brian Behlendorf <behlendorf1@llnl.gov>
Signed-off-by: Richard Laager <rlaager@wiktel.com>
Closes#8627
eaa25f1a8e