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I'm soon changing my motherboard (and CPU and RAM btw.) from Asrock J5005-ITX to the new one with Intel's B660 chip. I have Ubuntu Server booting root from ZFS pool.

How should I prepare for the migration? What should I double check before and should I expect any particular issues that I should prepare solutions for in advance?

From what I have been reading such hardware migrations are mostly safe but I haven't found much info on migrations particularly with system booting from ZFS.

The system originally was Ubuntu Server 18.04 with ZFS pool configured using this guide https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/Getting%20Started/Ubuntu/Ubuntu%2018.04%20Root%20on%20ZFS.html but now it is upgraded to 21.10 for highest compatibility possible with Alder Lake stuff.

Rychu
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I'm guessing here, as I have not gone through the process myself.

As long as you don't have full encryption, which might rely on your hardware TPM, you should be safe.

A way to test it would be to connect your harddrives to a live OS (booting from USB) running on a different machine and attempt to import the pool. If that works, ZFS has no ties to your motherboard.

One thing you might encounter though are hardware compatibility issues in the boot process, here you'll need more seasoned Ubuntu users to comment on that aspect.

Lockszmith
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  • Thanks for your thoughts. I appreciate. Do you think that failed boot after migration may damage the pool somehow or make any irreversible changes to the data? My pool runs in mirror mode. I started to wonder wouldn't it be safer to first boot with only one SSD and leave the other laying on the desk just in case? If everything will boot well then I'll shutdown and reattach the other one. If not then I'll have a backup that I can use to boot J5005 again to avoid extended downtime of the server. Just thinking out loud here – Rychu Jan 24 '22 at 19:54
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    If you are using ZSYS with snapshots I doubt any damage would happen. You can always revert to a previous snapshot state. – Lockszmith Jan 24 '22 at 20:34
  • Everything went amazingly fine. I mean from the OS perspective. I had been reading the internet for a few hours preparing myself for grub failure and creating the LiveCD and it booted as if nothing had happened – Rychu Feb 05 '22 at 20:21
  • That's great news! Please run the following: apt policy zfs* and zfs version. Make sure that all zfs packages match in versions. If they don't read this – Lockszmith Feb 05 '22 at 21:53
  • I'm not sure I understand what you mean by zfs packages match in versions. If zfs version gives me 2.0.6 then all packages should be in 2.0.6? This is the output of these commands on my server. Is this correct? https://pastebin.com/bs4fAcgE – Rychu Feb 07 '22 at 21:36
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    I had an issue in 20.04, you are running 21.10. By the output you sent, you are good! What to look for: It is imperative that zfs (the utils) and zfs-kmod (the kernel driver) match - otherwise simple features might not work. With the policy output, what counts is what is installed. – Lockszmith Feb 07 '22 at 22:41
  • Great, thank you for all your help! – Rychu Feb 08 '22 at 09:24