Installation onto ZFS?

Bluefin
1

Hello,

I’ve search this forum and the Github issues and seen that ZFS is available for Bluefin. But when I try to install from the ISO, it just sees the zpool as used space.

I’m using ZFSBootmenu and the other distros (mainly Debian based) I’ve installed have involved some non-standard steps (booting a live image, installing the ZFS packages, creating a dataset, installing to a chroot in the dataset), so I didn’t really expect the installer to work off the bat. Looks like the Fedora installation instructions follow a similar approach. However, I’m not seeing a live image either, so it seems like I can’t adapt that for Bluefin.

I considered installing to a non-ZFS partition, but I think I’d need to put another boot manager in before ZFSBootmenu to do that and that seems rough.

I’m fairly experienced with (Debian) Linux, but pretty new at dealing with boot environments and installers (and ZFS TBH), so apologies if I’m missing something easy.

Thanks.

2

That’s correct. Our ISOs are not live images. Additionally, they are actually just a plain fedora install and not ones with our modules added.

Additionally, ostree is not conducive for how zfsbootmenu tries to set the kernel cmdline as well. But I would agree with idea that you would need to be on a non zfs partition for the rootfs and have an additional bootloader.

I do agree that zfsbootmenu is an amazing tool.

3

Ah, I see.

Sad to hear that ostree and zfsbootmenu don’t play well together. I would probably need to learn more about both to understand why.

So when I see people reference ZFS in Bluefin (or other Universal Blue flavors), should I assume that they have a root FS in a non-ZFS file system and then mount ZFS for /home and others?

4

I do not know if anyone has moved /var or /home to zfs yet.

But yes zfs is non rootfs.

5

Bluefin, and other atomic images, like to set up the disk the way they want, and I think attempts to change that leads to breakage.

I have a standard install for my root drive.
I have a couple of 2TB NVMe drives configured as btrfs striped, which I bind mount to ~/work, and 4x 16TB in zfs raidz1 mounted on /mnt/tank for backups and data storage.

So with creative bind mounts, you could do something similar. NB I do have to sudo mount -a after a reboot. Haven’t looked into that yet.

For root and home, I really don’t know what advantage zfs would have over btrfs.