Make ZFS usage as easy as possible

[mika]

ZFS comes fully supported starting with Ubuntu Xenial 16.04, it's also supported within Proxmox. I'm still uncertain about the license situation, but we should at least try to make usage of ZFS as easy as possible with Grml ISOs (and also provide support within grml-live to build ZFS-enabled Grml ISOs).

[mika]

Quoting from a mail I sent to the grml user mailing list:

What works though is building ZFS on the running Grml live system
(assuming enough RAM is available, worked fine for me e.g. with 2GB
in a VM). Relevant steps, verified on grml64-full 2020.06-rc1:

  apt update
  apt install --yes linux-headers-$(uname -r) gcc
  apt install --yes --no-install-recommends zfs-dkms
  modprobe zfs
  apt install --yes zfsutils-linux

Then you should have everything what's needed to use ZFS on Grml.

BTW: you can even create a Debian package of the resulting zfs
kernel modules for re-usage then:

  apt install --yes --no-install-recommends debhelper
  dkms mkbmdeb zfs/0.8.4   # this assumes you've zfs-dkms v0.8.4 present

This should give you
/var/lib/dkms/zfs/0.8.4/bmdeb/zfs-modules-5.6.0-2-amd64_0.8.4_amd64.deb
which includes the built zfs modules which you could then install on
next boot of Grml without having to go through the compile steps
again.

FTR, we've https://github.com/grml/grml-live/issues/78 to track
"Make ZFS usage as easy as possible", we might come up with 1) a script
which automates the above steps or 2) provide a way how to provide
the zfs-modules-*.deb via deb.grml.org or so, but someone™ needs to
find the time to take care of this. :)

[anarcat]

as someone who started experimenting with ZFS on Debian recently, this question has been on my mind quite a bit. it's really not great to have to have the toolchain installed everywhere to have the right kernel modules built for the kernel you're currently running.

someone worked on binary packages for ZFS but they're really just that, binary packages (e.g. DEBIAN/ instead of debian/), so not the best. But the idea is there. In my notes, I also found the magic command dkms mkbmdeb zfs/2.0.3 to automagically build a .deb for the current kernel, well, just as you did.

And it looks like, since #117, we do have a way to build GRML isos with ZFS... so what's the blocker here? is it just a matter of folding the ZFS grml-live flag into the default set?

i've also been considering taking this beast upstream, in debian.org itself, but I'm not sure i want to climb up that "oh but ubuntu does it, surely it's okay" hill, and the tumble down copyright flamewar that would surely follow...

maybe it would be easier to have some... thing that would push .deb files automatically to some trusted third-party repo like, say, I don't know... https://deb.grml.org? :p

[jkirk]

Just tested the given commands to enable zfs support with our latest Grml release grml-full 2022.11 and I can confirm that they still work.

Unfortunately mkbmdeb has been removed from upstream dkms (see: #1009179), so creating a Debian package currently does not work.

@anarcat Did you find an easy solution?