4 ms·

I tried this alongside Void Linux, but I found I don't really need it. TBH, this is really cool. I liked that I'm able to choose snapshots for booting - a very

by esjeon 4y ago

I tried this alongside Void Linux, but I found I don't really need it. TBH, this is really cool. I liked that I'm able to choose snapshots for booting - a very good recovery option. The interface is well polished, and comes with fzf for quick searching. It's a true dream for distro hoppers, since ZFS works like thin-provisioned partitions (though distro options are limited due to ZFS). Pretty cool in and out. But it turned out to be a super-overkill for me. Firstly, I stopped dual-booting like a decade ago. I run everything else in VMs. Secondly, the host system these days hardly breaks. Lots of things work out-of-box unlike old days, and service settings can be isolated in containers. Thirdly, my host environment can be recreated within an hour including the download time and few trims, as long as `/home` is backed up. So I don't worry much about the root partition. I wonder how this is working for others.

E39M5S62 4y ago
I use ZFSBootMenu to boot a single distribution on each of my systems. While it certainly can help booting multiple different environments, the real value-add to me is that my entire OS is contained on a single filesystem. There's no longer a need to make an entirely separate boot pool to work around GRUBs extremely limited ZFS support. Because ZBM (can) use the kernel and ZFS userland+modules on your own system, it's never really behind what your OS is running. Additionally, since we import the pool read-only by default, new breaking features/pool flags in ZFS typically aren't a problem. It's only when you try to import a pool read-write that ZFS will have issues, so we detect that, warn you and then prevent it from happening. Since it also ships as an EFI executable that can import/boot any pool, it's really easy to make recovery media. Just throw the EFI on a USB drive with an ESP and name it BOOTX64.EFI and most modern firmware will use it in the absence of any other working boot entries.
zaarn 4y ago
For me the big selling point is that it supports booting encrypted ZFS with zstd compression and other modern features enabled. So your boot pool doesn't have to be restricted to the GRUB set while still giving you all the goddies (and more, since you can just drop to a linux shell)

by esjeon 4y ago

E39M5S62 4y ago

I use ZFSBootMenu to boot a single distribution on each of my systems. While it certainly can help booting multiple different environments, the real value-add to me is that my entire OS is contained on a single filesystem. There's no longer a need to make an entirely separate boot pool to work around GRUBs extremely limited ZFS support. Because ZBM (can) use the kernel and ZFS userland+modules on your own system, it's never really behind what your OS is running. Additionally, since we import the pool read-only by default, new breaking features/pool flags in ZFS typically aren't a problem. It's only when you try to import a pool read-write that ZFS will have issues, so we detect that, warn you and then prevent it from happening. Since it also ships as an EFI executable that can import/boot any pool, it's really easy to make recovery media. Just throw the EFI on a USB drive with an ESP and name it BOOTX64.EFI and most modern firmware will use it in the absence of any other working boot entries.

zaarn 4y ago

For me the big selling point is that it supports booting encrypted ZFS with zstd compression and other modern features enabled. So your boot pool doesn't have to be restricted to the GRUB set while still giving you all the goddies (and more, since you can just drop to a linux shell)