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

[Robert David]

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.