Re: [gentoo-user] rescue cd for zfs 2.1 or thereabouts

[John Covici <covici@ccs.covici.com>]

On Tue, 31 Aug 2021 07:11:53 -0400,
Robert David wrote:
> 
> Hi John,
> 
> my approach is to have EFI partition with staticly compiled grub, alpine
> linux rescue system and kernel with tiny initramfs for zfs root.
> 
> It works really well, only thing you need to consider is when upgrading
> root pool, you will not be able to boot to previous BE with old zfs.
> Without upgrading the pool, the transition is just easy as recompiling
> new kernel and upgrading the zfs userspace tools.
> 
> For the alpine I use script to put a new version on /boot
> https://github.com/robertek/root-scripts/blob/master/alpine_recovery_update
> 
> and having grub entry:
> 
> menuentry "Alpine linux recovery" {
>         linux   /boot/vmlinuz-lts modules=loop,squashfs,sd-mod,nvme quiet 
> nomodeset
>         initrd  /boot/initramfs-lts
> }
> 
> The alpine extended version contains zfs modules, so you only need to
> "apk add zfs" and then modprobe zfs.
> 
> The extended version is little bit bigger, but I'm fine to live with 1G efi
> partition.
> 
> Robert.
> 
> On Monday, August 23, 2021 10:15:10 AM CEST John Covici wrote:
> > Hi.  I have been using 5.4 lts kernels for a while, but it seems I
> > need to change to 5.10 lts -- even Debian is now using 5.10, so it
> > seems time to do this.
> > 
> > Now, the problem is that I am using zfs and will not give it up, and
> > the version I have been using 0.8.6 is no longer supported in 5.10
> > versions of the kernel.  So, I need a newer version of zfs and a
> > rescue cd in case I get into trouble.  Sysresc seems to no longer be
> > compatible withgentoo linux, so what is available?  I could use gentoo
> > catalyst to make something -- I have done that in the past, but its
> > quite a bit of work and I would prefer if there were something
> > available I could use out of the box.
> > 
> > Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 

Well, I never use a boot pool, I boot with ext4 and just do the root
on zfs.  But, I was more interested in some external media, so I am
looking at that Linux Recovery file system to see if I can get that
working, or if there is a way to add zfs to the sysresc cd, I might do
that.

-- 
Your life is like a penny.  You're going to lose it.  The question is:
How do
you spend it?

         John Covici wb2una
         covici@ccs.covici.com