Ok so you have a zfs volume in Opensolaris and you want it in Linux. So theirs no easy way to say this, but its not as easy as zfs import -a
You have to convert it to a lower version and theirs no easy way to do that.
Here is how I did it. I just don't like how slow OpenSolaris is on x86 hardware so I'm moving my fileserver back to linux but I still want ZFS. I did some test in linux and it works great, better then it does in BSD which is surprising.
The best way to do this, is to export to the volume created in linux then export it to file from linux then import it into the newly created verision in linux.
The linux version doesn't do well with internal send/receive. External send to internal receive. Or sending or receving to or from files <> seems to work well but its doesn't want to duplicate pool to pool locally. I tested it with small and large pools and the two step process seems to work best. I don't see this being fixed in the future as their doesn't seem to be development at the moment.
I believe their is a good chance that oracle might pick up zfs and make it more compatible with Linux, either by relicensing it or something along thoses lines. They seem to have a vested interested in linux and adding ZFS support to their Redhat clone might help to give them an advantage. If I was oracle I would definately be looking at ZFS closely as well as other solaris feature. Some features of solaris would be nice to have in Linux. Such as zfs, dtrace, svc(SMF). I personally belive that the linux kernel is a supperior kernel in function, but wish it had a more open licensing like bsd. Their is a great deal more compatible with bsd at least from a legal standpoint.
I'll update this tomorrow, with step by step instructions. With possible alternatives that should work according to ZFS specifications, but just didn't in my setup, probably due mostly to the stablility of the still fairly young linux port of ZFS. Also note that in my experience thus far I have not had any luck running iostat while their is any activity on a zfs partition. I am curious to see if these compatibilites transfer to FreeBSD and I have a pretty good feeling they will as I belive this the version are the same and FreeBSD might even be a later version in the current build (13 I believe). Freebsd seems to have a higher likely hood of stability and has more development going on with ZFS probably due to the fack that it is being incorporated into the kernel and Solaris and BSD have more in common then Linux and Solaris.
EDIT: ZFS is still not usable on Linux. Hopefully this will change in the future. Maybe a change of licenses...
