What does HackerNews think of zfsbootmenu?

ZFS Bootloader for root-on-ZFS systems with support for snapshots and native full disk encryption

Language: Shell

#201 in Hacktoberfest
#111 in Linux
When root on ZFS breaks on Arch Linux | Mar 2023
Does Arch Linux have boot environments (or equivalent)?

     Boot Environments allows the system to be upgraded, while preserving the
     old system environment in a separate ZFS dataset.
* https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?beadm

    The beadm command is the user interface for managing ZFS Boot Environments
    (BEs). This utility is intended to be used by system administrators who want
    to manage multiple Oracle Solaris instances on a single system.
* https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E86824_01/html/E54764/beadm-1m.ht...

> A ZFS boot environment is a bootable clone of the datasets needed to boot the operating system. Creating a BE before performing an upgrade provides a low-cost safeguard: if there is a problem with the update, the system can be rebooted back to the point in time before the upgrade.

* https://klarasystems.com/articles/managing-boot-environments...

Or perhaps:

> In essence, ZFSBootMenu is a small, self-contained Linux system that knows how to find other Linux kernels and initramfs images within ZFS filesystems. When a suitable kernel and initramfs are identified (either through an automatic process or direct user selection), ZFSBootMenu launches that kernel using the kexec command.

* https://github.com/zbm-dev/zfsbootmenu

Ask HN: What Are You Working on This Year? | Jan 2023
I'm continuing to work on https://github.com/zbm-dev/zfsbootmenu . Support for Debian's initramfs-tools, more install guides for distributions, better documentation.
Linux boot partitions and how to set them up | Nov 2022
I'm a huge fan of UKI - it's part of the underlying 'magic' of ZFSBootMenu (https://github.com/zbm-dev/zfsbootmenu/). We ship a single EFI file that is a full Linux kernel, a semi-custom initramfs and an embedded command line. With that, we can fully support root-on-ZFS because we don't have to re-implement a complex filesystem in a bootloader ... like GRUB. Because we're not trying to re-implement ZFS (or any other modern/complex filesystem), we can ALWAYS be current. If a new version of ZFS is released, all we have to do is build a new EFI executable with that baked in to the embedded initramfs.

There are serious concerns with SecureBoot and being able to unlock your own bootloader - but UEFI itself is a nice universal base to target in 2022.

Let’s Talk OpenZFS Snapshots | Jul 2021
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This is implemented for Arch Linux with bieaz or zbm; and Ubuntu with zsys.

bieaz: https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/Getting%20Started/Arc... zbm: https://github.com/zbm-dev/zfsbootmenu zsys: https://github.com/ubuntu/zsys
FreeBSD 13.0 | Apr 2021
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Take a look at https://github.com/zbm-dev/zfsbootmenu/ . Full boot environment support for Linux, along with the ability to create a new environment from a snapshot in your bootloader, live-diff snapshots to see _when_ something changed, and even chroot into a boot environment to fix things.