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

[Bjørn Øivind Bjørnsen]

On 04/04/13 07:49, Stanislav Seletskiy wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 3, 2013 at 7:44 PM, Tom Gundersen <teg at jklm.no> wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, Apr 3, 2013 at 12:26 PM, Stanislav Seletskiy
>> <s.seletskiy at gmail.com> 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

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