ALEZ VS zsys

You might also look at the alez script and adapt a bunch of that. It's a bit out of date, and it doesn't get you a RAIDZ1 installation, but all the steps in the script add up to an arch on zfs installation at the end, it's just going to need to be figured out and done manually to get you what you want. But even running through it and ending up with an install to make sure your hardware setup is capable would be a good test.

If you're having trouble getting ZFS up and running on the live image I can recommend the ALEZ ISO. It has a ZFS installer too but I personally never liked the ZFS conventions people keep using (such as making arbitrary ROOT/ dataset then putting everything inside it, and naming the zfs pool something generic like 'rpool'. No thanks).

From this bug report on github, here is a clear explanation of the problem:

This is a good thing for ZFS and public perception of ZFS. Ubuntu has made some very poor choices with how they've integrated ZFS -

* zsys has both implementation and design flaws. They utilize two zpools - one with limited feature flags that GRUB can use and one general pool, and then try to tightly couple datasets between those two pools while coordinating snapshots. zsys routinely runs a system out of space due to not cleaning up snapshots. It's been known to destroy user data as well.

https://github.com/ubuntu/zsys/issues/196

Example: https://github.com/ubuntu/zsys/issues/155

Heard of it, but I have no idea how it works and if I must install ubuntu server completely new. After a bit googling it seems dead? “It seems the project has been dead for months now. What going on?” https://github.com/ubuntu/zsys/issues/213

Ubuntu isn't my preferred OS these days, but I've had excellent experiences with it's ZFS root installs as well as it's included zsys: https://github.com/ubuntu/zsys

Re: things I've actually dealt with, see -- #172

I even filed a very polite GH issue about how zsys doesn't handle other systems/sanoid snapshots well, to which I got no response. However, a previous response to a user with the same issue was "Turn that other method of snapshot-ing off and delete your other snapshots" which, I'm sorry, just doesn't make any sense to say to any ZFS user -- "Pound sand and delete some of your data, then maybe it will work." Say what?

https://github.com/ubuntu/zsys/issues/112 - This could be an incompatibility with the way docker stores volumes, but this looks like it should've been fixed a while ago?