Arch Linux

milkytwix

Member

Registered: 2023-05-31

Posts: 13

Heya, Nub here, trying to go Arch with ZFS on Root /w mirror

Heya, years ago I switched from Windows to Linux, namely Manjaro. It sounded quite good to me: Rolling Release based on Arch, Germany based, helpful community AND on top of it based on Arch.
I used it for quite some time and was kinda happy. But I suffered from things that were unnecessary, and those things became more and more frequent. Every time I looked at my suffering and was wondering - would I had to endure this if I would go Arch?
In the meantime I changed my homelab from an ordinary Synology NAS to a zoo of servers (proxmox, truenas, ...) and became a fan of ZFS.
Combining this two realities the wish to go away from Manjaro and go to ZFS on root became more and more urgent.
So I started my journey towards Arch. Arch installation was the reason to go Manjaro initially (quite a hefty step for a Windows user), so I was quite happy to see the new functionality of the Arch installer - it made my first steps easy like a breeze: Install Arch in a VM, play around with it for 1 or 2 weeks, copy my Manjaro system with all it's glory (the glory that is called KDE) and then... try to go ZFS.

So that is were I am: Having a VM which has Arch installed, having a Workstation from which I will only migrate when I can do it quick, and having a minimal physical copy of my workstation to do some testing of the migration.
The goal is to have a Arch installation with ZFS on a mirror, so that if one NVMe stick breaks I can continue working. I don't care for encryption (yet).

To my utter surprise I cannot find a good writing about it. I find this wonderfull wiki page:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Instal … nux_on_ZFS
I wanted to follow it, but it does not talk about the mirror. My search for Arch on ZFS root with mirror always points to information with things like "Linux Raid for the boot partition" or stuff like "use ext4 for boot and just for /home ZFS" - and all those "guides" are quite old.
Is there a good guide which focuses on the mirror and uses just ZFS (with the needed FAT32 for EFI)? How to handle grub on a mirror? How to partition /boot? It is a pity that Arch installation is so.... cumbersome.

Lone_Wolf

Administrator

From: Netherlands, Europe

Registered: 2005-10-04

Posts: 15,128

Re: Heya, Nub here, trying to go Arch with ZFS on Root /w mirror

I have never heard of anyone trying that on archlinux. This may be because archlinux doesn't have a zfs-enabled kernel in repos (and probably never will) and so there's no support in early boot for ZFS .

https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/ … 20ZFS.html looks like a good point to start.

I also found  a writeup by ubuntu user that describes how to add  a mirror to an exisiting boot drive, https://gist.github.com/yorickdowne/a2a … 87d35bff3e .

---

Disliking systemd intensely, but not satisfied with alternatives so focusing on taming systemd.

clean chroot building not flexible enough ?
Try clean chroot manager by graysky

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,248

Re: Heya, Nub here, trying to go Arch with ZFS on Root /w mirror

The article also links to https://kiljan.org/2018/09/23/a-referen … rch-linux/ which seems to go a bit into details for how to do this as well.

spaceone

Member

Registered: 2010-06-24

Posts: 8

Re: Heya, Nub here, trying to go Arch with ZFS on Root /w mirror

Well, I just did a ZFS root installation on a raspberry pi with booting from USB nvme, where I had also to fiddle with qemu, but I basically followed those instructions:

nstalation of manjaro zfs root
[HowTo] Install full Manjaro on ZFS filesystem

And specific for rpi, however it could still be useful:
rpi-zfs-root
Installing Arch Linux ARM(aarch64) with ZFS root on RPi4

Last edited by spaceone (2023-06-06 16:42:07)