I’ve heard that it’s possible to install Debian GNU/kFreeBSD on ZFS partition. Following this link, brought me to this patched d-i, but… I’m not perfectly sure what should I do with those three files (initrd.gz, kfreebsd.gz and mini.iso), should I burn mini.iso at boot from it and that would be all? Or are there any other steps I need to take?
Also, it would be nice to know, whether there are any suggestions/recommendations about partitioning during installation. Will /, /boot and /home suffice? Or should I add swap (I’m not using swap, but GNU/kFreeBSD might need it, right?) or maybe remove some of these partitions? And what about /boot partition’s file system? Does it work with UFS or should I use something else, like ext2 for example?
Joey Hess
[ Editor ]
All the patches Robert mentions in the blog post you linked to have reached unstable, so it should be possible to use the recently released d-i beta1 to install kfreebsd on zfs.
The mini.iso is just a small CD you can boot. You don’t need the other 2 files. I recommend using the mini.iso and not the netinst CD for now if you need zfs.
I was able to boot the kfreebsd installer in kvm. I had to run it on a 64 bit machine to do so.
Since partman-zfs is still only in unstable, you need to force the installer to download it from there. You can do this by editing the command line in grub before booting the installer — press “e” and then in the editor, add a new line:
set kFreeBSD.mirror/udeb/suite=sid
It may be possible to use root on zfs — I see there have recently been improvements in grub’s zfs support. The installer displays a big scary warning if you try, but does let you override that.
I tried once without root on zfs, which went fine, and twice with -- both of those times the installer rebooted in the middle of the install (probably a kernel panic?). So there's some issue still I guess with root on zfs.
NN comments
Filip Chabik
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Thanks a lot for this answer! Actually ZFS support didn’t make it into Squeeze: http://robertmh.wordpress.com/2010/10/13/about-zfs-in-squeeze/ I was trying (successfully) to install Debian GNU/kFreeBSD on UFS with /boot on ext2 partition. I’m not quite sure whether the “set kFreeBSD.mirror/udeb/suite=sid” is really needed — I could use ZFS and it format disk partition properly. Problem was with update-grub command which didn’t succeeded.
Joey Hess
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That blog post is not accurate to the current situation. parted in squeeze does have zfs support, and has since october 17th — 4 days after that post said it wouldn’t :P
