Any RAID solution that does block/bit level striping will be a “blackbox” as you describe it. That’s not a bad thing (nor is your approach) but pros and cons.
As someone who has a couple times needed to rip 100tb of ZFS disks out of something, put them into a different machine with a different architecture or OS in some random order, and access everything without having lost anything, it's hard for me to overstate how great it is that such a thing is even possible.
Which ZFS commands?
There’s a potential problem, in that you can’t import a poll on an OS version that lacks the feature flags that are enabled on the pool. The way to solve that is to choose a common subset when creating the pool.
CPU endianness switches work fine, IME - I have pools I originated on SPARC Solaris that work fine on x86, I just got a patch landed for an edge case in one recent feature not interoperating properly between endiannesses but other than that it's worked fine for me.
What kind of issue did you see?
Thats great news, hopefully that rare potential problem got addressed in the last year or so.
Steps to recreate: compile linux (maybe FreeBSD as well, that is a little more fuzzy) for LE. Boot new kernel and setup a new pool. Recompile for BE. Boot new kernel and enjoy bootloop...
lol, actually things are starting to come more into focus... page size played a role in the whole thing. As I said, edge case :) No potential for data loss though.
Sounds like a fun experiment to run down. Maybe I'll go look when I'm done the current nightmare I'm tinkering with.
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly... I'm presently writing something to crack 8051 firmware xnor'd by a 64 byte key, I don't remember how - but the previously described ZFS edge case somehow got me to this point.
I cut a patch to fix sparc64 building with the new zstd feature. I then discovered the new zstd feature was broken for endian portability because lol bitfields.
It ended up re-importing OK when I brought it back to the OpenIndiana box. Whew! I then did an export, and Ubuntu was then able to import the pool.
So hopefully the pool was exported, but the worst case scenario isn't very bad.
That is not going to change between different machines as far as I know, I might be wrong about this. I made some bad choices (in hindsight) when making this pool for my uses, but it's still going strong many years later. [1]
This current pool (which is now old, 50k+ power on hours on these disk) has survived a motherboard dying randomly and one or two SSD failures with the OS on.
Always just installed a OS on a new SSD and it's been picked up just fine.
[1] I went with RAID-Z2 for 6x3TB WD Reds where I probably should have made mirrored pools or something like it to gain more space? It's been a while since I looked at it. Can't really expand this pool or add more storage without replacing each disk one by one with something bigger.
I could make another pool with new disks but I'd lose another 20% to parity.
Caveat: things may have changed since then - it was at least six years ago.
They have not seen a huge amount of reads/writes though, if we don't count the weekly scrub and weekly usage by just me.