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Comment by vetinari | Hacker News Reader

For me it means, that kernel, zfs, bootloader and initramfs-creating scripts are tested as a whole, by the distribution. For the user it means, that he can fearlessly update any of these packages and upon reboot, the system will successfully start.

That is not given if you have one-off custom integration of these parts. For a while, I had a CentOS box with openzfs kABI modules; having to tinker after updates to mount the pool was not fun.

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> For the user it means, that he can fearlessly update any of these packages and upon reboot, the system will successfully start.

NixOS currently has this! Since upgrades are atomic, if you have some other version constraint that pushes you towards a kernel version that ZoL doesn't target or support*, your system just doesn't finish building the upgrade and never switches over. If the system upgrades, that means the kernel was built and ZFS was added to your initial ramdisk successfully.

In case that succeeds but there are still ZFS issues (which I've never seen or heard of), NixOS will still let you boot the old, working system until you figure out what messed you up in the upgrade. Just select it in GRUB or whatever you're using.

Maybe NixOS overall is more DIY than what you're looking for, but the ZFS support feels very first class! I personally recommend giving it a try, if you're up for giving a declarative distro a chance.

*: I've never heard of this happening except to NVIDIA users, since NVIDIA's proprietary kernel module imposes restrictions on how new of a kernel you can use. On AMD, I've never had a ZFS-related update issue.

Void Linux with ZFSBootMenu isn't far off. Multiple core Void team members uses and maintain ZFS support; kernel version bumps are blocked on OpenZFS support. ZFSBootMenu handles the bootloader, which can support fully upgraded ZFS pools and doesn't need pared-down zpool properties like Grub.

ZFSBootMenu is developed natively on Void, and their wiki has bootstrap instructions for a Void install with root on ZFS. Everything's well supported, including native zpool encryption. Plus gives you a multitude of tools right in the bootloader -- snapshot rollback/management, boot environment creation/management, booting older kernels, and a full recovery command line with zfs available. You can tweak the bundled dracut config to include other tools as well.

Even supports generating a unified, SecureBoot-signed EFI binary.

The experience is leagues ahead of the Ubuntu mess.

In the last two weeks or so, I've added in guides for Debian Bullseye and Fedora Workstation 37 as well!

https://docs.zfsbootmenu.org/en/latest/index.html

https://docs.zfsbootmenu.org/en/latest/guides/debian.html

https://docs.zfsbootmenu.org/en/latest/guides/fedora.html

Void remains our primary development platform, but we're working on improving documentation and support for other distributions.

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