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Show HN: Zectl – ZFS Boot Environment Manager for Linux

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Re: Show HN: Zectl – ZFS Boot Environment Manager for Linux

#11

Post by Gigamo »

kitotik wrote: post #9
johnramsden wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't tried it myself with encryption, but I can't see it making a difference. The bootloader, and initial ZFS setup will be what needs to be changed to facilitate encryption.

Hmm, how/when/where would the ‘zfs load-key’ happen? I only know how to use the systemd-ask-password hack to decrypt non-root datasets, but can’t get my head around how that would work with fully encrypted root dataset.

If you're using Arch, the zfs hook that comes with the archzfs package takes care of this:

https://github.com/archzfs/zfs-utils/blob/master/zfs-utils.i...

Re: Show HN: Zectl – ZFS Boot Environment Manager for Linux

#12

Post by cyberpunk »

Finally. I got used to this on solaris 10 and missed it until FreeBSD got it.. ZFS and beadm are the included in the reasons i continue to run FreeBSD as a workstation, but these days with k8s and such I do tend to run a lot of linux VMs to do my daily work (devops stuff)...

The work lappy runs ubuntu with zfs on root, and it's pretty seamless, I'm very much onboard with it having boot environments! (zsys)

Re: Show HN: Zectl – ZFS Boot Environment Manager for Linux

#13

Post by blue1 »

cyberpunk wrote: post #12

Finally. I got used to this on solaris 10 and missed it until FreeBSD got it.. ZFS and beadm are the included in the reasons i continue to run FreeBSD as a workstation, but these days with k8s and such I do tend to run a lot of linux VMs to do my daily work (devops stuff)... The work lappy runs ubuntu with zfs on root, and it's pretty seamless, I'm very much onboard with it having boot environments! (zsys)

Zfs on a laptop means you run zfs with a single disk?

Re: Show HN: Zectl – ZFS Boot Environment Manager for Linux

#14

Post by 0xcde4c3db »

blue1 wrote: post #13
cyberpunk wrote: post #12

Finally. I got used to this on solaris 10 and missed it until FreeBSD got it.. ZFS and beadm are the included in the reasons i continue to run FreeBSD as a workstation, but these days with k8s and such I do tend to run a lot of linux VMs to do my daily work (devops stuff)... The work lappy runs ubuntu with zfs on root, and it's pretty seamless, I'm very much onboard with it having boot environments! (zsys)

Zfs on a laptop means you run zfs with a single disk?

This is not unheard of among FreeBSD users. Most of ZFS's features do not require (or even necessarily benefit from) multiple disks.

Re: Show HN: Zectl – ZFS Boot Environment Manager for Linux

#15

Post by gigatexal »

0xcde4c3db wrote: post #14
blue1 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zfs on a laptop means you run zfs with a single disk?

This is not unheard of among FreeBSD users. Most of ZFS's features do not require (or even necessarily benefit from) multiple disks.

Yup checksumming and snapshots and compression and at rest encryption are amazing to name a few

Re: Show HN: Zectl – ZFS Boot Environment Manager for Linux

#16

Post by kevans91 »

kitotik wrote: post #9
johnramsden wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't tried it myself with encryption, but I can't see it making a difference. The bootloader, and initial ZFS setup will be what needs to be changed to facilitate encryption.

Hmm, how/when/where would the ‘zfs load-key’ happen? I only know how to use the systemd-ask-password hack to decrypt non-root datasets, but can’t get my head around how that would work with fully encrypted root dataset.

Presumably it would be like FreeBSD's GELI, where early boot stuff would need to detect that it's looking at an encrypted root and know to prompt. In theory, this is relatively straightforward- with boot environments, the zpool bootfs property indicates the root dataset, so I wouldn't think you need to look too far.

[edit: this is done in our loader, so presumably you'd use grub?]

Re: Show HN: Zectl – ZFS Boot Environment Manager for Linux

#17

Post by aidenn0 »

blue1 wrote: post #13
cyberpunk wrote: post #12

Finally. I got used to this on solaris 10 and missed it until FreeBSD got it.. ZFS and beadm are the included in the reasons i continue to run FreeBSD as a workstation, but these days with k8s and such I do tend to run a lot of linux VMs to do my daily work (devops stuff)... The work lappy runs ubuntu with zfs on root, and it's pretty seamless, I'm very much onboard with it having boot environments! (zsys)

Zfs on a laptop means you run zfs with a single disk?

Not necessarily, my laptop has 2 M2 slots.

Re: Show HN: Zectl – ZFS Boot Environment Manager for Linux

#18

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

blue1 wrote: post #13
cyberpunk wrote: post #12

Finally. I got used to this on solaris 10 and missed it until FreeBSD got it.. ZFS and beadm are the included in the reasons i continue to run FreeBSD as a workstation, but these days with k8s and such I do tend to run a lot of linux VMs to do my daily work (devops stuff)... The work lappy runs ubuntu with zfs on root, and it's pretty seamless, I'm very much onboard with it having boot environments! (zsys)

Zfs on a laptop means you run zfs with a single disk?

They make adaptors that let you replace the optical drive with another SATA drive. But my FreeBSD laptop has one disk and it's fine. You don't have redundancy, but you still get all the other features (snapshots, clones, compression), and even if it can't correct errors it will still catch data errors which is more than most other filesystems will do.

Re: Show HN: Zectl – ZFS Boot Environment Manager for Linux

#19

Post by kevans91 »

Oh, this is cool! We'll need to check out this plugin mechanism as a thought for bectl -- it's fairly inflexible at the moment.

libze_util_temporary_mount would be a good candidate for using (or being replaced by?) the recently-introduced zfs_mount_at in libzfs once that's widely available enough. That was a fairly trivial addition to libzfs that was initially made to support libbe's be_mount(), which previously used the effectively non-portable amount() [post-mortem: should read zmount, but autocorrect is alwayscorrect]

Re: Show HN: Zectl – ZFS Boot Environment Manager for Linux

#20

Post by andoriyu »

blue1 wrote: post #13
cyberpunk wrote: post #12

Finally. I got used to this on solaris 10 and missed it until FreeBSD got it.. ZFS and beadm are the included in the reasons i continue to run FreeBSD as a workstation, but these days with k8s and such I do tend to run a lot of linux VMs to do my daily work (devops stuff)... The work lappy runs ubuntu with zfs on root, and it's pretty seamless, I'm very much onboard with it having boot environments! (zsys)

Zfs on a laptop means you run zfs with a single disk?

I ran ZFS with a single disk on a laptop. What's wrong with that?
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