zpool status reports " The pool is formatted using an older on-disk format." when it is really running the latest supported version (Doc ID 1616362.1)

Last updated on JANUARY 15, 2024

Applies to:

Symptoms

Zpool status complains about the zpool version not being the latest, such as:

 # zpool status -v
pool: xxxx
state: ONLINE
status: The pool is formatted using an older on-disk format. The pool can
      still be used, but some features are unavailable.
action: Upgrade the pool using 'zpool upgrade'. Once this is done, the
      pool will no longer be accessible on older software versions.

...

...

And zpool upgrade reports something similar to:

# zpool upgrade -v
This system is currently running ZFS pool version 34. <--- Current Version

The following versions are supported:

VER  DESCRIPTION
---  --------------------------------------------------------
1   Initial ZFS version
2   Ditto blocks (replicated metadata)
3   Hot spares and double parity RAID-Z
4   zpool history
5   Compression using the gzip algorithm
6   bootfs pool property
7   Separate intent log devices
8   Delegated administration
9   refquota and refreservation properties
10  Cache devices
11  Improved scrub performance
12  Snapshot properties
13  snapused property
14  passthrough-x aclinherit
15  user/group space accounting
16  stmf property support
17  Triple-parity RAID-Z
18  Snapshot user holds
19  Log device removal
20  Compression using zle (zero-length encoding)
21  Deduplication
22  Received properties
23  Slim ZIL
24  System attributes
25  Improved scrub stats
26  Improved snapshot deletion performance
27  Improved snapshot creation performance
28  Multiple vdev replacements
29  RAID-Z/mirror hybrid allocator
30  Encryption
31  Improved 'zfs list' performance
32  One MB blocksize
33  Improved share support
34  Sharing with inheritance  <-- Latest version is same as the current version

For more information on a particular version, including supported releases,
see the ZFS Administration Guide.

Changes

 N/A or Unknown

Cause