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ZFSBootMenu

docs.zfsbootmenu.org

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Re: ZFSBootMenu

#11

Post by wongarsu »

SushiHippie wrote: post #8
nisa wrote: post #3

Kudos to everyone involved in this! Love everything about this. Using it on my notebook, on dedicated servers rented at Hetzner as well as on Hetzner-Cloud, as well on a bunch of dedicated servers in a rack. Solves almost all problems related to ZFS and Linux. Booting this from SYSLINUX works very well as well as UEFI - it's extensible and you can run it with the ZFS git version if you use the generate-zbm command. S…

May I ask how you use this on the dedicated server?

Hetzner's dedicated servers give you KVM access for stuff like tweaking your bios settings, installing an OS, or I guess using your boot menu. You have to request them via support ticket, but last time I did that I got it within 5 minutes, no questions asked.

If you have your own server in a rack somewhere chances are you bought one with a similar web interface (IMPI/BMC/whatever your brand calls it) on a separate always-on NIC on the mainboard.

https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/dedicated-server/maintainance...

Re: ZFSBootMenu

#12

Post by dsp_person »

E39M5S62 wrote: post #9
dsp_person wrote: post #4

I was looking at using this for my arch zfs-on-root setups, but I've instead just been hacking on /etc/grub.d/10_linux and /lib/initcpio/hooks/zfs to get the boot menu setup I want with grub. I like the simplicity of it this way with less dependencies (especially otherwise needing to use AUR for the zfsbootmenu build or use the pre-built binary blob). One concern I had with zfsbootmenu was I couldn't figure out how t…

There shouldn't be any issues catting the real initramfs with microcode into another file. I do that, as does another ZBM developer. What do you see when you try it? I started ZBM years ago by hacking on the same grub script, then progressed to what it is now!

When I booted normally with the concatenated image (ensuring removing the original microcode img from the grub.cfg initrd command), I booted and I confirmed the microcode loaded with (dmesg | grep microcode).

Then switching to ZBM, while it did boot with the concatenated image, I didn't see microcode loaded in dmesg.

Re: ZFSBootMenu

#13

Post by londons_explore »

It seems lame that UEFI firmware needs to 'mount' a filesystem to load a bootloader.

That bootloader needs to mount a filesystem to find the kernel.

The kernel needs to mount the filesystem to run the system.

Each of those mount operations is done with different code, and normally each involves some config or search process to find the right disk/partition. If any of the searches finds the wrong partition or is misconfigured, you get a boot failure.

It really feels like the boot process is more complex than it needs to be, with more opportunities for failure than necessary.

Re: ZFSBootMenu

#14

Post by codetrotter »

wongarsu wrote: post #11
SushiHippie wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May I ask how you use this on the dedicated server?

Hetzner's dedicated servers give you KVM access for stuff like tweaking your bios settings, installing an OS, or I guess using your boot menu. You have to request them via support ticket, but last time I did that I got it within 5 minutes, no questions asked. If you have your own server in a rack somewhere chances are you bought one with a similar web interface (IMPI/BMC/whatever your brand calls it) on a separate al…

When I installed FreeBSD on my Hetzner servers, I did so by booting the servers into the Linux based rescue mode and then I think I used dd to write the mfsBSD media onto one of the hard drives.

This way I didn’t have to request KVM access for my servers.

Perhaps a similar method can be used in order to install ZFSBootMenu

Re: ZFSBootMenu

#15

Post by jeroenhd »

londons_explore wrote: post #13

It seems lame that UEFI firmware needs to 'mount' a filesystem to load a bootloader. That bootloader needs to mount a filesystem to find the kernel. The kernel needs to mount the filesystem to run the system. Each of those mount operations is done with different code, and normally each involves some config or search process to find the right disk/partition. If any of the searches finds the wrong partition or is misco…

There's not really a way around it unless you hardcode the bootloader rather than store it on disk.

That said, there are only two steps in the modern boot process on a PC: the UEFI firmware loading a basic FAT driver and the kernel mounting the other filesystems. The UEFI bootloader can use the existing FAT driver to load the kernel and the initramfs which will use the same code to mount partitions.

You can skip the UEFI bootloader and directly boot unified kernel images after putting them on the UEFI partition.

Re: ZFSBootMenu

#16

Post by [deleted] »

londons_explore wrote: post #13

It seems lame that UEFI firmware needs to 'mount' a filesystem to load a bootloader. That bootloader needs to mount a filesystem to find the kernel. The kernel needs to mount the filesystem to run the system. Each of those mount operations is done with different code, and normally each involves some config or search process to find the right disk/partition. If any of the searches finds the wrong partition or is misco…

[deleted]

Re: ZFSBootMenu

#18

Post by vermaden »

Which Linux distribution provides this out of the box in its installer like FreeBSD does? ... along with optional LUKS encryption as FreeBSD offers optional GELI encryption.

I will wait ...

Re: ZFSBootMenu

#19

Post by nullifidian »

londons_explore wrote: post #13

It seems lame that UEFI firmware needs to 'mount' a filesystem to load a bootloader. That bootloader needs to mount a filesystem to find the kernel. The kernel needs to mount the filesystem to run the system. Each of those mount operations is done with different code, and normally each involves some config or search process to find the right disk/partition. If any of the searches finds the wrong partition or is misco…

>It really feels like the boot process is more complex than it needs to be

You can use EFISTUB kernels directly (through efibootmgr) and use UEFI bios as the bootloader. There is no automatic kernel discovery with this method of course.

Re: ZFSBootMenu

#20

Post by londons_explore »

jeroenhd wrote: post #15
londons_explore wrote: post #13

It seems lame that UEFI firmware needs to 'mount' a filesystem to load a bootloader. That bootloader needs to mount a filesystem to find the kernel. The kernel needs to mount the filesystem to run the system. Each of those mount operations is done with different code, and normally each involves some config or search process to find the right disk/partition. If any of the searches finds the wrong partition or is misco…

There's not really a way around it unless you hardcode the bootloader rather than store it on disk. That said, there are only two steps in the modern boot process on a PC: the UEFI firmware loading a basic FAT driver and the kernel mounting the other filesystems. The UEFI bootloader can use the existing FAT driver to load the kernel and the initramfs which will use the same code to mount partitions. You can skip the…

I'd quite like UEFI to be able to pass some kind of argv[0] to the direct-loaded kernel, so the kernel knows exactly which file on which partition of which disk it was loaded from. That would then become the default root filesystem.

That effectively removes all config from the process - and means that any disk with a uefi executable kernel can be booted without the mystery step of "lets try to figure out where we're booting from".

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