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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

#21

Post by johnramsden »

kevans91 wrote: post #19

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…

loader ZFS integration is really great on FreeBSD, do people occasionally want to use something else? Is that why you would consider looking to support other options? Really would be nice to see loader ported to Linux - I know it was recently brought over to Solaris. Maybe a project for another day...

Thanks for the tip, the temporary mounting seems a bit like a hack so that's good to know there's a better option.

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

#22

Post by kevans91 »

johnramsden wrote: post #21
kevans91 wrote: post #19

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…

loader ZFS integration is really great on FreeBSD, do people occasionally want to use something else? Is that why you would consider looking to support other options? Really would be nice to see loader ported to Linux - I know it was recently brought over to Solaris. Maybe a project for another day... Thanks for the tip, the temporary mounting seems a bit like a hack so that's good to know there's a better option.

I've seen the occasional rumbling about folks wanting to use grub for one reason or another- while not necessarily ideal (having the caveats of a non-loader environment), I can see the value in it if you really don't need the amenities loader offers (debugging support, kmods).

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

#25

Post by johnramsden »

mskalski wrote: post #24

Looks cool. Currently only one machine which I have with zfs is NixOS, which has it own mechanism to handle such versioning, or do you see some advantages of using zfs approach?

I used to use NixOS, and I do have some of the best ZFS support out of the box I've seen on Linux. I'm not sure if the approach of using zfs boot environments would play well with NixOS considering how they manage the configuration and rollbacks separately. They also manage the bootloader, so I don't know if the changes would survive. Something could probably be set up to work, but it would probably feel as though you were working against the intended way the system should work.

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

#26

Post by HankB99 »

_jal wrote: post #2

This looks nice. Going to have to give it a try. I'd love to see automated ZFS-on-root setup, but suspect that'll have to come from Canonical if we ever get it.

I thought that Ubuntu was already capable of doing this in the latest release (19.10.)

There are third party scripts to accomplish this. I would look at https://github.com/saveriomiroddi/zfs-installer. The only reason I have not used it is that I had already written my own https://github.com/HankB/Linux_ZFS_Root. And in this case, better the devil I know. (I'm presently updating my script to follow the most recent instructions at https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/wiki/Debian-Buster-Root-on-ZF...)

ZFS-installer appears to be more mature and is seeing more effort than mine. Perhaps I should give it a try.

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