You had a setup with multiple root filesystems which each had
canmount=on and mountpoint=/. So they both tried to automatically mount
at /. (When booting in the root-on-ZFS config, one was already mounted
as your root filesystem.) ZFS, unlike other Linux filesystems, refuses
to mount over non-empty directories. Thus, mounting over / fails.  Thus
`zfs mount -a` would fail, which was the underlying command for zfs-
mount.service. As a result of the mount failing, you got into a state
where some datasets mounted, but not all of them. As a result of this,
you had empty directories for some mountpoints in the wrong filesystems.
As a result, those empty directories continued to break `zfs mount -a`.

In your case, it's likely that the relevant directory was /vms/vms. This
was preventing you from mounting the vms dataset at /vms. To be
absolutely clear, this was because /vms was non-empty, because it
contained /vms/vms.

You first fixed the underlying issue with the root filesystems by
setting canmount=noauto on both of them. That still left the second
problem. Once you `rmdir`ed the directory(ies) that were in the way,
mounting works correctly.

Separately from the issues above, it's best practice to NOT store anything in 
the root dataset on a pool (the dataset with the same name as the pool, in this 
case "vms"), because that dataset can never be renamed. If you're not actually 
using the "vms" dataset itself, I suggest the following:
zfs unmount vms/vms
rmdir /vms/vms # this rmdir not required, but I like to cleanup completely
zfs unmount vms
zfs set canmount=off vms
zfs mount vms/vms

-- 
You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu
Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1846424

Title:
  19.10 ZFS Update failed on 2019-10-02

To manage notifications about this bug go to:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/zfs-linux/+bug/1846424/+subscriptions

-- 
ubuntu-bugs mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs

Reply via email to