Alternative FS OS Installs (btrfs, zfs)

[Michael Butash]

Interesting notes on this, more ways ubuntu tends to keep fscking with 
me, though seems more systemic too.

So I have noted ubuntu and arch both have "how-to" guides to booting 
zfs, so word up, lets do it, my neon system keeps getting worse.  Nope.

Ubuntu apparently doesn't know how to recognize my NVMe drives still to 
enumerate them via /dev/disk/by-* in their 4.4.* kernel, and forcing it 
up to 4.8.12 kernel doesn't help either.  Which coincidentally most 
things like zfs tend to sanity-check against with moving hardware 
devices and relying on uuid symlinks.  Bad assumption by ZFS.

This is a udev thing, adding rules should work, done this before, this 
problem has existed since 2015.  Nope.

Two days later, I can't seem to figure out how to trick ubuntu udev into 
actually making the damn nvme drives enumerate with udev enough to 
appear.  Tried adding udev rules approved myself everywhere, rebaking 
initrd images with rules, they just refuse to work.

Finally tried arch's iso and hacking around the default iso to add 
arch-zfs libs/repos to even build the pool there natively, and they 
won't install zfs kernel libs compatible with the iso initrd.  Great.

The joys of new hardware and laggard distros.  I think it would work if 
I could just build the damn zpools and make udev notice they were 
there.  Argh!

I'm starting to read up on btrfs, apparently the NVMe drives on Linux 
are broken enough to mess with every distro.  Hopefully btrfs doesn't 
have the same broken assumptions of udev.

-mb


On 12/03/2016 12:22 PM, Michael Butash wrote:
> Anyone using "alternative" file system methods like btrfs or zfs to 
> boot with?  Nothing seems too native, but can be made to work it 
> seems, just wondering if this is one of those "should do" vs. "can do".
>
> The notion of something that can do raid, encryption, volume 
> management, and snapshot features is attractive, but I've always 
> layered mdraid, luks encryption, lvm, then ext atop that.  This has 
> been pretty solid when the ssd's don't die 3-6 months later, even with 
> aligning partition to block boundaries and such, trim, etc.  I'd love 
> to have one single encrypted partitions I can use volumes within for 
> the os mounts, btrfs and zfs in theory do most of this now.
>
> How well is really the question...
>
> Commentary appreciated!
>
> -mb
>