ZFSBootMenu – A boot loader to manage ZFS boot environments for Linux

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • zfsbootmenu

    ZFS Bootloader for root-on-ZFS systems with support for snapshots and native full disk encryption

    The problem is, ZFS support on GRUB2 hasn't been great, partly due to licensing issue requiring lots of ZFS internals to be re-implemented in GRUB. This resulted in issues such as grub-probe unable to detect ZFS pools due to unsupported ZFS features[1] (including native ZFS encryption, which is a deal-breaker for many)

    ZBM took another approach. It provides a small initramfs image that are built on the host machine (via `generate-zbm` script) via standard method such as dracut or mkinitcpio. This image provides an interface for decrypting/mounting ZFS filesystems using the very same ZFS kernel module installed on the host. After the filesystem is mounted, it then kexec'd into the host kernel.

    This also means ZBM doesn't completely replaced GRUB2 or syslinux. Instead, it rely on those intermediate bootloader (including EFI bootloader such as rEFI/gummiboot) to load ZBM itself. (Though ZBM itself only has built-in hooks for syslinux and gummiboot). Being an initramfs give an extra benefit of providing interesting mechanism. e.g., dealing with FDE on a headless server by providing a SSH server for entering an encryption key[2] during boot.

    (No affiliate; just a very happy user.)

    [1]: https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?58555

    [2]: https://github.com/zbm-dev/zfsbootmenu/wiki/Remote-Access-to...

  • zfs

    OpenZFS on Linux and FreeBSD

    You may be interested in recent (~the last month) developments in adding Windows support to OpenZFS: https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/pull/14034

  • WorkOS

    The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

  • quibble

    Quibble - the custom Windows bootloader

    It's not ZFS, but let's check this with btrfs https://github.com/maharmstone/quibble

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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