On Tuesday, February 6, 2024 6:22:34 PM CET Grant Edwards wrote: > On 2024-02-06, J. Roeleveld <jo...@antarean.org> wrote: > > On Tuesday, February 6, 2024 4:38:11 PM CET Grant Edwards wrote:
> >> I presume that boot/root on ext4 and home on ZFS would not require an > >> initrd? > > > > Yes, that wouldn't require an initrd. But why would you limit this? > > Because I really, really dislike having to use an initrd. That's > probably just an irrational 30 year old prejudice, but over the > decades I've found live to be far simpler and more pleasant without > initrds. Maybe things have improved over the years, but way back when > I did use distros that required initrds, they seem to be a constant, > nagging source of headaches. In the past, initrd's were a nightmare. Even the current tools (dracut, genkernel) are a pain and force the user to do it their way. The only initramfs generator I use is the "bliss-initramfs" one and that is because it actually works and doesn't get in the way. And I don't build a new kernel for the server. For my desktops and laptops, I embed the initramfs into the kernel using a very simple set of files (script with the commands and a config detailing which files to include) the total size of both files is about 8K and was mostly grabbed from a howto page about 10 years ago and has stayed unchanged since then. (I added a little script to update the config when library versions change, but that is it) > > ZFS works best when given the FULL drive. > > Where do you put swap? My swap is a ZFS volume. I find using the recommended method of configuring it is safe and I have not seen any kind of lockup due to swap. Did have some due to a bug in the HBA-driver when some deranged dev decided to change sensible defaults though. But it would freeze before even getting to enabling swap. > > For my server, I use "bliss-initramfs" to generate the initramfs and > > have not had any issues with this since I started using ZFS. > > > > Especially the ease of generating snapshots also make it really easy > > to roll back an update if anything went wrong. If your > > root-partition isn't on ZFS, you can't easily roll back. > > True. However, I've never adopted the practice of backing up my root > fs (except for a few specific directories like /etc), and haven't ever > really run into situations where I wished I had. It's all stuff that > can easily be reinstalled. I did start backup up the full system as restoring from backup (especially rolling back a snapshot, but same is true when grabbing the backup from tape) is a lot faster than reinstalling all the software and making sure the config (which these days isn't just in /etc anymore) is still the same. -- Joost
