Back in March, I wrote about how much better ZFS pool recovery was coming, along with what turned out to be some additional exciting features, such as the long-awaited feature of shrinking ZFS pools by removing vdevs. The good news for people using ZFS on Linux is that most of both features have very recently made it into the ZFS on Linux development source tree. This is especially relevant and important if you have a damaged ZFS on Linux pool that either doesn't import or panics your system when you do import it.

(These changes are OpenZFS 9075 and its dependencies such as OpenZFS 8961, and the vdev removal changes, although there are followup fixes to them such as OpenZFS 9290.)

These changes aren't yet in any ZFS on Linux release and I suspect that they won't appear until 0.8.0 is released someday (ie, they won't be ported into the current 0.7.x release branch). However, it's fairly easy to build ZFS on Linux from source if you need to temporarily run the latest version in order to recover or copy data out of a damaged pool that you can't otherwise get at. I believe that some pool recovery can be done as a one-time import and then you can revert back to a released version of ZFS on Linux to use the now-recovered pool, but certainly not all pool import problems can be repaired like this.

(As far as vdev removal goes, it currently requires permanently using a version of ZFS that supports it, because it adds a device_removal feature to your pool that will never deactivate, per zpool-features. This may change at some point in the future, but I wouldn't hold my breath. It seems miraculous enough that we've gotten vdev removal after all of these years, even if it's only for single devices and mirror vdevs.)

I haven't tried out either of these features, but I am running a recently built development version of ZFS on Linux with them included and nothing has exploded so far. As far as things go in general, ZFS on Linux has a fairly large test suite and these changes added tests along with their code. And of course they've been tested upstream and OmniOS CE had enough confidence in them to incorporate them.