I haven’t tried using ZFS inside VMWare workstation, I have loaded zfs.ko on a ESX virtual machine though, and that at least didn’t panic the kernel.

Are you running a 32bit or 64bit version of FreeBSD? For ZFS, both Sun and the FreeBSD team strongly recommend a 64bit platform.

Ok, what has happened:
1. I used your csup file and suprisingly csup removed all files under /usr/src ;-) Don’t know why csup did this …
2. Anyway I reloaded source via sysinstall, then used almost the same csup file, couple of modified lines as follows:
“*default base=/var/db
*default release=cvs tag=RELENG_7″
3. Then did csup again, them make stuff … waiting for couple of hours
4. I am using BSD on a VirutalBox so assuming it caused kernel panic and reboot.
5. Though I could login and voila zfs upgrade -v shows version 13.

So, thank you very much for your help. It seems a simple process but takes a long time and not so sure I want to repeat it on my prod system.

Thanks.

Here is my csup file:

*default host=cvsup10.FreeBSD.org
*default base=/usr
*default prefix=/usr
*default delete use-rel-suffix
*default compress
src-all         release=cvs tag=RELENG_7

After I ran csup to update /usr/src, I did a

$ make buildworld && make buildkernel && make installworld && make installkernel

After the reboot, I did a mergemaster (unrelated to zfs though), then I ran

$ zfs upgrade

When the kernel loads the zfs.ko module, it should say what version it is. Also, you should see this in /usr/src/UPDATING:

20090520:
        Update ZFS to version 13. ZFS users will need to re-build
        and install both kernel and world simultaneously in order
        for the ZFS tools to work. Existing pools will continue to work
        without upgrade. If a pool is upgraded it will no longer be
        usable by older kernel revs. ZFS send / recv between
        pool version 6 and pool version 13 is not supported.

If you don’t see that, then you are pulling down the wrong branch :)

Keep in mind, I’m using RELEASE_7, not 7_2, which means I’m following a more current codebase. The big difference is there are no freebsd-update binaries available when you do this. Not a big deal for me since I only maintain this one server at home, and I use a custom kernel anyway.

Hope this help!

I am wondering how did you do exactly the upgrade … I did csup and make world stuff and so, but no lucky. Could you please explain and show all the steps you did? For example what’s csup config file looks like.

Thanks very much,
Gabor