hrmpf VS archiso-zfs

I use zfsbootmenu with hrmph (https://github.com/leahneukirchen/hrmpf). You can see the list of packages here (https://github.com/leahneukirchen/hrmpf/blob/master/hrmpf.pa...). I usually build images based off this so they’re all there, otherwise you’ll need to ssh into zfsbootmenu and load the 2 gb separate distro. This is for home server, though if I had a startup I’d probably setup a “cloud setup” and throw a bunch of servers somewhere. About of times for internal projects and even non-production client research having your own cluster is a lot cheaper and easier then paying for a cloud provider. It also gets around when you can’t run k8s and need bare metal. I’d advised some clients on this setup with contingencies in case of catastrophic failure and more importantly test those contingencies but this is more so you don’t have developers doing nothing not to prevent overnight outages. A lot cheaper than cloud solutions for non critical projects and while larger companies will look at the numbers closely if something happened and devs can’t work for an hour the advantage of a startup is devs will find a way to be productive locally or simply have them take the afternoon off (neither has happened).

I imagine these problems described happen on big iron type hardware clusters that are extremely expensive and spare capacity isn’t possible. I might be wrong but especially with (sigh) AI setups with extremely expensive $30k GPUs and crazy bandwidth between planes you buy from IBM for crazy prices (hardware vendor on the line so quickly was a hint) you’re way past the commodity server cloud model. I have no idea what could go wrong with such equipment where nearly ever piece of hardware is close to custom built but I’m glad I don’t have to deal with that. The debugging on those things work hardware only a few huge pharma or research companies use has to come down to really strange things.

ZFSBootMenu or hrmpf.

hrmpf

I'm curious how that compares with this void live distro: https://github.com/leahneukirchen/hrmpf

void-mklive zbm-wiki hrmpf

As for recovery images, just download hrmpf and be done.

Hrmpf rescue system, built on Void Linux\ (18 comments)

DKMS is the best option if you really want to keep up with Arch updates and if you're experienced with Linux (for instance you know how to fix your system from the archiso if needed -- for ZFS you'll need to manually load the zfs module from the archiso; this script is very helpful).

Make an EFI boot partition of maybe 200MB using your favorite distro iso and make a zpool on a second partition of the remaining space followed by a single dataset on that zpool named root at the minimum with normalization=formD, compression=lz4 or zstd and optional encryption flags and install your rootfs to that. I've found this process is easiest using the Archlinux ISO and this github project to get zfs in the archiso environment.

The script available there: https://github.com/eoli3n/archiso-zfs makes it extremely easy to add ZFS support to any Arch ISO after it has booted. You can copy any standard ISO to a USB drive, boot off it, then run `curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/eoli3n/archiso-zfs/master/... | bash` and you'll have ZFS support in a few seconds, without having anything to worry about.

With Arch there is an easy way to get the iso to read ZFS with a simple script, it is a bit of a no no unless you verify the script before using it. https://github.com/eoli3n/archiso-zfs

My own experience is with ZFS, first on Arch Linux (using the excellent https://github.com/eoli3n/archiso-zfs). I learned a lot doing that and modifying the scripts to my liking.

You can load zfs modules in the archiso with: https://github.com/eoli3n/archiso-zfs

Because zfs isn't part of the mainline kernel -- you need to add the appropriate packages during the install process -- meaning you need to either boot from a standard Arch ISO install disk and then download the packages as explained here: https://github.com/eoli3n/archiso-zfs or you need to make a custom arch ISO where you add the zfs packages. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/ZFS#Create_an_Archiso_image_with_ZFS_support. The only issue with creating the custom ArchISO -- you need an actual basic arch installation somewhere to create the disk -- so basically you need a standard Arch installation to create a custom install disk whereby you can install an Arch zfs installation. Here are other good tutorials for this: https://ramsdenj.com/2016/06/23/arch-linux-on-zfs-part-1-embed-zfs-in-archiso.html

Both ZFS updates and pacman breaking are rare enough that I forgot that would happen. Though using this rescue system would work, there's also a group that maintains a script to grab the correct ZFS module for a running archiso, might come in handy for you.

https://github.com/eoli3n/archiso-zfs

You're having a problem due to archiso not updating every time the kernel updates, though you could fix this issue there's also just an easier way. The archzfs repo group has made a tool to grab the correct zfs module for the running kernel, see https://github.com/eoli3n/archiso-zfs