My alpine setup is modest and pretty usual. I installed it back in 3.19 times with the main partition using Ext4 and all data on ZFS. Why didn't I install the root file system on ZFS? Well, I needed the machine quickly and installing using default settings instead of messing with ZFS was a faster way to do it. And, as it often happens, temporary installation became permanent.
As Alpine Linux is on 3.20.2 now, I felt my system might do well with a bit of upgrading. It's easy after all. I just changed my /etc/apk/repositories ti point toward the latest stable repositories:
https://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/latest-stable/main
https://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/latest-stable/communityAnd followed this with standard update-upgrade dance:
apk update
apk upgradeOne short reboot later and my system was upgraded! Oh, yeah, and my data was gone. What gives?
Fortunately for my blood pressure, I quickly determined that my data was not really gone but just hiding as my ZFS modules weren't loaded and all ZFS commands advised me to do modprobe zfs. I followed the same only to be greeted by an error message:
modprobe: ERROR: could not insert zfs: Invalid argumentI tried removing and readding packages, fixing them, and making many more small adjustments. Pretty much any command that the internet had to offer, I tried. But all those things always brought me back to the same cryptic message.
At the end, I decided to fall forward. If one upgrade broke the system, maybe another upgrade would solve it. And yes, someone smarter would probably go with a downgrade instead, but I don't roll that way. It was either upgrade or reinstall for that naughty server.
Where do you upgrade from 3.20, you ask? Well, there's always an "edge". And upgrade to it was again just a minor change to /etc/apk/repositories followed by update/upgrade:
https://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/main
https://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/communityWouldn't you know it, edge was fine and my ZFS was buzzing along once more.
But, while I didn't mind reinstalling this machine, keeping it on edge long-term (as my "temporary" projects tend to get), didn't really give me a level of confidence I wanted. So I decided either 3.20 would work or I would reinstall it fully now I knew for sure my data was fine.
How do you downgrade to 3.20? Well, the first step is to change /etc/apk/repositories yet again:
https://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/latest-stable/main
https://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/latest-stable/communityThe difference is that this time I wanted to force a downgrade of installed packages thus slightly modified commands:
apk update
apk upgrade -aAfter a reboot, my system happily presented itself in all its 3.20 glory with ZFS loaded without any further issues.
What was the problem? I have no idea. However, apk package handling and painless upgrade/downgrade is growing on me.