Long time no see… Not much hacking in the last few months. Not much ranting either (some of you I’m sure will appreciate ;-).
Anyway, I recently grew excited to learn that ZFS is coming to Debian. I decided to bite the bullet, patched the missing bits in GRUB and Parted, a few small changes in D-I and there’s now a modified Debian Installer with ZFS support for you to play with. Enjoy!
Note1: I didn’t have time or interest in warping D-I into the N:1:M model used in ZFS. Instead, this installer assumes each zpool has exactly one device and exactly one filesystem.
Note2: Don’t ask for i386, it was intentionally left out. ZFS is designed with modern CPUs in mind. It can work on i386 with special tuning but I don’t want to encourage users to do this unless they’re well aware of what they’re doing.
Thoughts of undetermined usefulness 
September 28, 2013 at 18:36 |
When some one searches for hiis necessary thing,
therefore he/she wants to be available that in detail, so that thing is maintained over here.
September 24, 2013 at 00:42 |
Wow , este pieza de escritura es Niza , mi hermana está analizando tal , para voy a decirle informará ella.
May 10, 2012 at 13:24 |
[…] Debian Installer with ZFS […]
November 27, 2010 at 23:29 |
[…] a consequence of this my unofficial installer can now be considered […]
November 25, 2010 at 13:19 |
[…] so I reply here. First off, thanks for being one of the first Debian developers in trying out my modified installer with ZFS support, you guys made my […]
October 21, 2010 at 04:59 |
[…] ZFS userland utilities and GRUB) made it and are currently in Squeeze. becoming a result, the unofficial installer I built in sept will (unless relatively something weird happens) continue to work during Squeeze […]
October 14, 2010 at 09:58 |
[…] ostatní součásti, jako třeba GRUB a utility pro správu ZFS, v systému jsou, takže pokud použijete neoficiální instalátor, můžete provozovat Debian nad […]
October 13, 2010 at 12:07 |
[…] (including ZFS userland utilities and GRUB) made it and are already in Squeeze. As a result, the unofficial installer I built in September will (unless something weird happens) continue to work during Squeeze life […]
September 21, 2010 at 18:46 |
Cool. But lack of 32-bit x86 is very sad, and means I will not use kfreebsd at all. I use zfs on freebsd on my 32-bit laptop with problem and i’m very happy of it. Anyway zfsutils is provided for kfreebsd and it works. Only debian-insaller piece is missing.
September 21, 2010 at 20:53 |
It will be supported when my patches are integrated into official installer. In the meantime you can build a new installer on kfreebsd-i386 yourself with my patched sources (http://people.debian.org/~rmh/zfs/source/).
I still think ZFS on i386 is a bad idea though.
September 12, 2010 at 08:26 |
Just wanted to let you know that this worked quite well for me. Thanks for putting this together, it is really appreciated. Especially because it seems like freebsd 8.1 doesn’t seem to have ZFS support in its installer. So you are one of the few non-OpenSolaris based ways to get ZFS on root easily.
September 12, 2010 at 10:53 |
You’re welcome!
September 13, 2010 at 01:12
Just a small note, you may not want to suggest that people zfs attach a mirror. It turns out that when you do, it causes grub to bail out into rescue mode with error: couldn’t find root_dataset.
September 21, 2010 at 20:48
ZFS support in GRUB is still experimental. I added a note recommending use of a separate /boot with UFS.
January 21, 2011 at 15:43
Hi Robert
Is this still valid? Is there a possiblity to have /boot on a zfs mirrored?
Bests
January 21, 2011 at 15:59
I believe it’s fixed, see ZFS branch in upstream bazaar (this didn’t make it to Squeeze however).
July 30, 2011 at 17:47
It’s a bit late, but if anyone else finds this post and is having the “couldn’t find root_dataset” problem, there’s a patch to fix it here:
https://github.com/pendor/gentoo-zfs-overlay/blob/master/sys-boot/grub/files/grub-9999-fzap.patch
September 10, 2010 at 09:50 |
[…] Robert Millan stworzył nieoficjalną wersję instalatora Debiana z dodaną obsługą systemu plików ZFS. Informacją o tym podzielił się na swoim blogu. […]
September 9, 2010 at 12:04 |
Thanks, that’s very cool.
September 8, 2010 at 20:23 |
[…] Robert Millan anuncio la disponibilidad, en experimental, de las Imágenes del Instalador Debian con soporte ZFS. […]
September 8, 2010 at 14:53 |
[…] Robert Millan anunció que ya están disponibles imágenes experimentales del instalador de Debian con soporte para ZFS. […]
September 7, 2010 at 18:47 |
[…] que además de acumular la experiencia de la anterior versión incluye la destacable novedad de poder crear y utilizar ZFS como sistema de archivos […]
September 6, 2010 at 17:08 |
[…] I decided to bite the bullet, patched the missing bits in GRUB and Parted, a few small changes in D-I and there’s now a modified Debian Installer with ZFS support for you to play with. Enjoy! More here […]