I just saw a new feature that would be in a flag. Large block support. 
That would be available in newer versions but won't be in older, but 
will still be on version 5000. So if you had a pool with large blocks 
enabled you would need to upgrade to or use a distro that had large 
block support to import.

linda

On 4/21/15 9:33 AM, Andrew Berg wrote:
> 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.
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