zfsbootmenu VS archiso-zfs

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

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