hole_birth FAQ
The hole_birth feature has/had bugs, the result of which is that, if you do a zfs send -i (or -R, since it uses -i) from an affected dataset, the receiver will not see any checksum or other errors, but the resulting destination snapshot will not match the source.
ZoL versions 0.6.5.8 and 0.7.0-rc1 (and above) default to ignoring the faulty metadata which causes this issue on the sender side.
It is technically possible to calculate whether you have any affected files, but it requires scraping zdb output for each file in each snapshot in each dataset, which is a combinatoric nightmare. (If you really want it, there is a proof of concept here.
No, the data you need was simply not present in the send stream, unfortunately, and cannot feasibly be rewritten in place.
hole_birth is a feature to speed up ZFS send -i - in particular, ZFS used to not store metadata on when "holes" (sparse regions) in files were created, so every zfs send -i needed to include every hole.
hole_birth, as the name implies, added tracking for the txg (transaction group) when a hole was created, so that zfs send -i could only send holes that had a birth_time between (starting snapshot txg) and (ending snapshot txg), and life was wonderful.
Unfortunately, hole_birth had a number of edge cases where it could "forget" to set the birth_time of holes in some cases, causing it to record the birth_time as 0 (the value used prior to hole_birth, and essentially equivalent to "since file creation").
This meant that, when you did a zfs send -i, since zfs send does not have any knowledge of the surrounding snapshots when sending a given snapshot, it would see the creation txg as 0, conclude "oh, it is 0, I must have already sent this before", and not include it.
This means that, on the receiving side, it does not know those holes should exist, and does not create them. This leads to differences between the source and the destination.
ZoL versions 0.6.5.8 and 0.7.0-rc1 (and above) default to ignoring this metadata and always sending holes with birth_time 0, configurable using the tunable known as ignore_hole_birth or send_holes_without_birth_time. The latter is what OpenZFS standardized on. ZoL version 0.6.5.8 only has the former, but for any ZoL version with send_holes_without_birth_time, they point to the same value, so changing either will work.
