void-docs VS zfsbootmenu

In general, Void assumes familiarity with the principles of Linux and UNIX system. Basic questions about configuring or running a Linux system can frequently be answered with a Google search. The Internet grew up with UNIX, and Linux grew up on the Internet; you are encouraged to avail yourself of the extensive body of knowledge already out there. Some particulars of Void administration are described in the handbook; consult this document before asking common questions about configuring Void systems.

I know for sure that these images work with espeakup, and espeakup can be enabled at boot by adding live.screenreader to the command line as described here

You might look at https://docs.voidlinux.org/, which provides a good overview of Void. The package manager, xbps is [my opinion] better that apt [I have to use the latter in AntiX Linux].

the final criticism i have for void is the way they have decided to host their docs; as this void-docs. This bottlenecks the possible amount of expertise you'd receive from your doc writers by ensuring that only those who want to learn git are able to contribute to your docs. this, to me, is very inadequate if your intent is to have documentation written by those who are very good at docwriting but not necessarily maneuvering in version control systems like git. i'm not sure what the impetus was to move away from the traditional wiki model, but this from my perspective is a failure.

Follow the guide on the void website and you will be fine. Come here for support, we love helping others out and it's a great community, on par with the OpenBSD community as far as being helpful and encouraging you to learn the OS. If you find there's a package you need that hasn't been added to xbps yet, you can use a Flatpak or AppImage (easy way) or build the package yourself using xbps-src (advanced way, worth learning down the line).

I just made a PR on their github to add this.

Perl has traditionally been my language of choice for this sort of stuff (e.g. this script for converting mdBook to LaTeX), but more recently i've been focusing on POSIX shell scripts as a personal challenge and learning exercise.

from https://docs.voidlinux.org/

Understanding how runit manages services is critical. Also, there are certain "restricted" packages that xbps can manage but not download. The handbook does a good job covering both topics.

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