Paul (@paul@bsd.cafe)

20d

@stefano @whynothugo
For linux on ZFS, I recommend ZFSBootMenu. It really simplifies pretty much any deployment scenario.
On my laptop, I have 2 partitions, one for EFI and one for the ZFS pool. The EFI partition contains only the ZFSBootMenu file. Everything else, including the /boot files, are in a ZFS dataset. Everything is encrypted (with ZFS ecnryption on the default dataset).
ZFSBootMenu will ask for the password at boot time, and the loaded linux kernel will load the key from a file (added to the initial filesystem via update-initramfs or dracut).

And you can pick from quite a few distributions listed on the ZFSBootMenu site.

I'll add a screenshot with my current setup - partitions, zpool, datasets and encryption.

Screenshot of a terminal window showing:
1. lsblk output with a drive and 2 partitions, the first one mounted as /boot/efi
2. zpool configuration
3. zfs datasets, all datasets encrypted with aes-256-gcm

ALT

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20d

@paul @stefano @whynothugo i use zfsbootmenu on debian, it's awesome. also very safe to upgrade, since the instructions tell you to place both VMLINUZ.EFI and VMLINUZ-BACKUP.EFI, you can just upgrade the first one later without risking breakage. never had any issues with it, only issue i've ever seen is with debian itself when debian unstable at some point didn't correctly place zfs.ko into initramfs or something like that despite compiling it

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20d

@linus @stefano @whynothugo
Though I did manage to get ZFS on root with Debian (well, also Void Linux and Chimera Linux - but that's a whole different story), I settled on Ubuntu instead of Debian because of 2 issues related to ZFS:
1. Ubuntu distributes zfs.ko pre-compiled, alongside other modules (I'm not going to touch the legality of that - a lot was written on the subject, most of which I don't agree with - but regardless that's a Canonical problem, not a user problem);
2. ZFS support in Bookworm (via zfsutils-linux) was old. As in, it didn't work on the pools created with the other distributions mentioned above. Which on a server might not be such a big issue, but on a desktop/laptop, half the fun of using this approach is the ability to use multiple distros in the same pool. Or to switch distros without messing up the rest of the pool. I guess it could be avoided with the compatibility option, but it still made me walk away.

Edited 20d ago

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7d

@paul @linus @stefano @whynothugo I chose Ubuntu (for KDE Plasma) because the installer provides root-on-ZFS.

With that base, I have not yet figured out which of these will be the simplest way forward:

― bemgr
― zectl
― ZFSBootMenu.

<https://gist.github.com/grahamperrin/a65f5d819a6a8c54aff6079f63db33f6#user-content-management-of-zfs-boot-environments>

I see verbose guides, the verbosity creates a sense of complication.

I'd like the simplest possible guide to getting started, with any of the three options, where the boot environment layout/structure is predetermined by the installer for Ubuntu.

TIA

#rootonzfs #Linux #OpenZFS #ZFS #bemgr #zectl #ZFSBootMenu

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