On 2015.04.21 09:08, Munir Nassar wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 21, 2015 at 7:33 AM, Andrew Berg
> <aberg010 at my.hennepintech.edu> wrote:
> 
>> See the zpool-features man page. It varies by feature. Some will completely
>> prevent import in this case, while others may simply only make the pool
>> read-only. Also, some features are not mandatory at upgrade time and will not
>> be enabled automatically. If a feature is disabled, support for it is not
>> required for import.
> 
> This is a bit misleading, as the feature would need to have been
> disabled from the start.
Actually, I was mistaken about features not being enabled automatically.
Features are enabled automatically, but are not necessarily active. Any
enabled, but not active, features do not prevent import.

> 
> Lets say i create a feature of supercompressor which compresses
> everything with my super secret proprietary algorithm(so secret that
> even decrypting is a closely held secret), disabling this feature only
> affect NEW blocks and old blocks will remain compressed with this
> proprietary compressor rendering the pool unimportable by a ZFS
> implementation that does not understand the supercompressor feature
> flag.
A compression feature would always be active, so yes. However, one would be
unwise to activate this feature if one planned to ever use it on a system
without support for that proprietary feature. As I said, pay attention to which
features are going to be activated, and what support other systems have for them.