Re: [arch-general] Installing Arch Linux on pure ZFS root

On 04/04/13 07:49, Stanislav Seletskiy wrote:

On Wed, Apr 3, 2013 at 7:44 PM, Tom Gundersen wrote:

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On Wed, Apr 3, 2013 at 12:26 PM, Stanislav Seletskiy wrote:

...

In the light of "production ready" ZoL I've tried to install Arch on pure ZFS root (without additional boot partition) and stuck in problem with GRUB2.

Current version of GRUB2 is not detecting ZoL in any way ("grub-probe /" does not return zfs, but errors).

In the official repo on the github I've numerous see references to patched GRUB of version 1.99 (https://launchpad.net/~zfs-native/+archive/grub), but it is ubuntu only.

Does anybody install Arch on ZFS root/boot without additional partitioning? Is it even possible?

My guess is that this would be painful at least until a grub2 version with zfs support is released. A simple solution would be to use a separate /boot partition with a more standard filesystem. I'd suggest FAT32 or ext4.

-t

Tom, thanks for answer!

Yes, this solution is proposed in wiki.

But if one, for example, wants to make RAID10 with 4 HDD on pure ZFS (through pool mirroring), it is needed to take a bit from each one for boot partition, which is not so beautiful...

I will be glad to see is implementing ZoL support in GRUB2 even planned?

-- Stanislav Seletskiy

There is also the option of using an USB-key or harddrive for your /boot-partition. It is cheap, and allow you to keep the ZFS drives and /boot separate until it is better supported by upstream. That is what I do, albeit with an encrypted RAID instead of ZFS. Regards, Bjørn Øivind