On Tue, Aug 15, 2017 at 6:31 AM, John Covici <cov...@ccs.covici.com> wrote: > > I would like to know which cd has zfs support. I could not find one, > so I wrote some catalyst stuff to make an install cd with zfs support, > but it would be nice if I would not have to do that, a fair bit of > work. >
IMO this is the easiest option out there: http://www.funtoo.org/ZFS_Install_Guide (Just the parts about loading the zfs module.) It uses an Ubuntu 16.04 boot USB, and installs the packaged zfs modules/etc. You could certainly add them to a Gentoo or systemrescuecd boot disk, but Ubuntu should work just as well. All you need is something you can boot with that can create filesystems, mount them, expand tarballs, and run chroot. A lot of rescue CDs lack zfs support due to the whole GPL linking non-GPL concern, which many believe is illegal. If you're not putting root/usr on zfs then it is pretty easy to get zfs running on Gentoo (though in this case you probably don't even need a zfs-capable boot cd to start it). If you want to put root on zfs it gets trickier, and if you want to put boot on zfs it gets trickier still. There are docs for both, but I've never actually done them. If you want boot on zfs then your bootloader needs to support it and there are limitations on what features you can enable on your pool. I think that if boot is non-zfs then there are fewer restrictions on root, but you need some scripts to unmount it cleanly when shutting down (unless using systemd+dracut where you can pivot back to the initramfs for this - which apparently hasn't actually been tested on Gentoo). Is this your first Gentoo install, or your first Gentoo+ZFS install? If the former, you're definitely not doing this the easy way... -- Rich
