ZFS snapdir readability (Crosspost)

[Alan Somers]

On Thu, Nov 21, 2019 at 7:57 AM Borja Marcos <borjam at sarenet.es> wrote:

>
>
> > On 21 Nov 2019, at 15:18, Eric Borisch <eborisch at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Thu, Nov 21, 2019 at 7:46 AM Borja Marcos <borjam at sarenet.es> wrote:
> > > On 21 Nov 2019, at 13:59, Martin Simmons <martin at lispworks.com> wrote:
> > > I think that is incorrect.  You can mount a snapshot on /mnt like this:
> > >
> > > /sbin/mount -t zfs filesystem at snapname /mnt
> >
> > I’ve never seen that and, indeed, on FreeBSD 12.1 it’s not possible. Or
> I am terribly
> > sloppy today!
> >
> > Did I miss anything? Is it a new ZFS on Linux feature?
> >
> > In a quick test, this works both on Linux and on FreeBSD running ZoF
> (2019101600).
>
> Thanks, so it’s a new feature from ZoL. I am running the stock ZFS.
>
> Is it really intended to work or just some misunderstanding?
>
> ZFS originally didn’t offer any mechanism to mount snapshots explicitly.
> Except by cloning.
>

No, that is incorrect.  You've always been able to mount snapshots that
way.  It's not a new feature.
-Alan