[Hint] Building LFS with ZFS built-in
 

Figured I'd release my newest hint here. Enjoy and read thoroughly.

Comments and suggestions are welcome.

Thanks for the file. I've never tried to build a LFS system but this may motivate me to try something new. I briefly toyed with OpenSolaris and later OpenIndiana and was always impressed with the ability to make changes to the system and if something screwed up you could easily just boot into the previous BE.

I will advise that this hint is experimental at the moment and I'm testing it with the latest SVN 8-15-2014 for stability purposes.

Bruce is being updated on the progress of this build so it can be authenticated for actual production level usage. However, if your intention is to create a test system, then by all means, otherwise sticking to file systems like JFS and Ext4 are more advised.

Keep tabs on your zpool at all times with this build and scrub only if the zpool status reflects it. Make backups always, and learn to use the zpool snapshots first and foremost.

As a last minute edit, I want to make this perfectly clear. The instructions in the hint are aimed at using a standard ZFS partition using legacy mountpoint and a single zvolume for swap. Anything else is beyond the scope of the hint and is not mentioned. This includes anything like encryption and compression setup, so don't do it.

A future revision may touch on things if and when I feel like it, but for now, stay within the hint, do not deviate, or else I can't help you.

Sure, no production here. :-) Just a bunch of junkie old computers I like to play with. The "sacrificial lamb" will be an old desktop that currently runs Ubuntu 12.04/XP - 12.04 Wubi.

When the test build is completed I'll see about adding things like encryption support, compression, etc. but for now we're fine with the basics.

Update: I can confirm compression is stable and working.

You can set it as such:

Possible compression algorithms are:

on(default is lzjb)
gzip
zle
lz4

A bit of a retraction, I'm still unable to get ZFS bootable. I'm working on some solutions but so far I can't recommend ZFS completely yet as stable or viable as root.

You can however use it for a stable long-term storage drive though.