Installs Debian GNU/Linux 8 Jessie to a native ZFS root filesystem using a Debian Jessie Live CD and ZFS packages from backports.org.
If you like this project, you may also want to try to install a Debian Stretch ZFS root system.
- Boot Jessie Live CD ('standard' edition)
- Login (user:
user, password:live) and become root - Setup network and export
http_proxyenvironment variable (if needed) - Run this script
- User interface: Select disks and RAID level
- Let the installer do the work
- User interface: install grub to all disks participating in the array
- User interface: enter root password and select timezone
- Reboot
- grub (v2.02, included in Debian 8), especially
grub-probe, does not support all ZFS features and subsequently refuses to install. This script disablesfeature@hole_birthandfeature@embedded_data(and you must not enable those features after installation). - The ZFS SPL uses the system
hostid, which isn't initialized correctly on Debian systems. - Workaround for grub (v2.02) mysteriously not searching devices in
/dev/disk/by-idbut in/dev. - Some mountpoints, notably
/var, need to be mounted via fstab as the ZFS mount script runs too late during boot. - The EFI System Partition (ESP) is a single point of failure on one disk, this is arguably a mis-design in the UEFI specification.
- Booting via EFI has not been tested at all.
RAID10 Mirror with >= 6 disks fails to boot with grub, probably a grub bug.The (Virtualbox) BIOS does not detect more than 4 drives connected to a virtual SATA controller and therefore grub isn't able to access them. Operating the drives in a SCSI or mixed SATA/IDE/SCSI RAID10 configuration works fine, even with 6 or more drives.