I’ve been recently wanting to use zfs zones in Proxmox lxc containers. Is it necessary to keep the zfs binaries (zpool,zfs) in the host and the container in sync? Normally linux binaries continue to work on later kernel versions, is this also true for the zfs binaries.
While my main interest for this is Proxmox, would the same answers apply for Debian and the zfs kernel module?
For the most part, usually, mismatched binaries and kernel modules work okay.
But you may have occasional issues. Not like “oh shit my pool is toast” type issues, but you may find that some operation you only do every once in a while doesn’t work quite right, and when you chase it down, you eventually discover the userland<–>LKM mismatch. Then once you get the userland and kernel matched again, your problems are fixed.
This most commonly happens to people running Ubuntu with HWE kernels, IME. They frequently get out of sync with the Ubuntu ZFS userland binaries, because you’re basically running the next LTS’s kernel with the old LTS’ binaries.