hrmpf VS zfsbootmenu

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)

We use a couple nice home-grown functions in ZFSBootMenu to help debug things. We have a zdebug logging function that's peppered liberally throughout the code base - https://github.com/zbm-dev/zfsbootmenu/blob/master/zfsbootme...

Hitting ctrl-t on our main menu will, when booting with debug logging enabled, show a screen like this: https://imgur.com/Ge75zkP

We also have a flamegraph profiling mechanism that can be enabled with https://github.com/zbm-dev/zfsbootmenu/blob/master/zfsbootme... . That will dump data to a serial port, which when re-assembled, can be used to produce a graph like https://raw.githubusercontent.com/zbm-dev/zfsbootmenu/master...

Bash is suprisingly flexible.

A lot of what's in the Pure Bash Bible is horrifically slow. Many of those things are substantially faster, even when paying the cost of starting a new process, when you use an external and commonly available tool. I wrote a bash performance profiler that outputs data in a format that flamegraph.pl recognizes - it really helped identify where we could improve the performance of ZFSBootMenu.

https://github.com/zbm-dev/zfsbootmenu/releases/tag/v1.12.0

Don't fall in the trap of thinking things have to be written entirely in bash; it's okay to use other tools to help fill in the gaps.

If instead of "opensuse" you're asking for bootloader as grub can't boot from zfs, then, like i metnioned, i don't use grub2, i uninstalled it, instead i'm using https://github.com/zbm-dev/zfsbootmenu

I thought the following was supposed to fix this issue: https://github.com/zbm-dev/zfsbootmenu/commit/84da18e64ebcc0c483e7b2c7d3972f7d91784e63

All release assets, including EFI executables and kernel/initramfs pairs, are signed with signify, which provides a simple method for verifying that the contents of the file are as this project intended. Once you've installed signify (that's left as an exercise, although Void Linux provides the signify package for this purpose), just download the desired assets from the ZFSBootMenu release page, download the file sha256.sig alongside it, and run:

I think the consensus is that you probably shouldn't be installing a ZFS on root using the native installer anymore. They aren't really maintaining the packages that make that work. Instead the suggestion is to go the zfsbootmenu route of installing.

Glad to hear that everything is working for you! I've opened a PR that adds a warning about this condition - it should likely make it into 2.2.0.

You can install following instructions at https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/Getting%20Started/Debian/Debian%20Bullseye%20Root%20on%20ZFS.html which I've automated with https://github.com/HankB/Linux_ZFS_Root/tree/master/Debian. For scripting, you should also look at https://github.com/zbm-dev/zfsbootmenu. I'd probably go that way if I were starting from scratch.

ZBM provides an amazingly useful script in it's wiki here. This runs when a new kernel is updated by xbps and it snapshots your system before the kernel is installed. This creates a boot environment, and via the magic of ZFS boot environments, allows you to rollback any kernel update to a known, working configuration.

* https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E86824_01/html/E54764/beadm-1m.ht...

> A ZFS boot environment is a bootable clone of the datasets needed to boot the operating system. Creating a BE before performing an upgrade provides a low-cost safeguard: if there is a problem with the update, the system can be rebooted back to the point in time before the upgrade.

* https://klarasystems.com/articles/managing-boot-environments...

Or perhaps:

> In essence, ZFSBootMenu is a small, self-contained Linux system that knows how to find other Linux kernels and initramfs images within ZFS filesystems. When a suitable kernel and initramfs are identified (either through an automatic process or direct user selection), ZFSBootMenu launches that kernel using the kexec command.

* https://github.com/zbm-dev/zfsbootmenu