debian-stretch-zfs-root

Installs Debian GNU/Linux 9 Stretch to a native ZFS root filesystem using a Debian Stretch Live CD. Installation with a Debian Jessie Live CD is supported as well, ZFS packages from backports.org will be used in this case.

Usage

1. Boot Stretch Live CD ('standard' edition)
2. Login (user: user, password: live) and become root
3. Setup network and export http_proxy environment variable (if needed)
4. Run this script
5. User interface: Select disks and RAID level
6. Let the installer do the work
7. User interface: install grub to all disks participating in the array
8. User interface: enter root password and select timezone
9. Reboot

Fixes included

• grub (v2.02, included in Debian 9), especially grub-probe, does not support all ZFS features and subsequently refuses to install. This script disables feature@hole_birth and feature@embedded_data (and you must not enable those features after installation).
• 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.

Bugs

• Booting via EFI has not been tested at all.
• During installation you might encounter some SPL package errors (Please make sure the kmod spl devel package is installed) which can be ignored safely.
• grub-install mysteriously fails for disk numbers >= 4 (grub-install: error: cannot find a GRUB drive for /dev/disk/by-id/...).

Credits

• https://github.com/hn/debian-jessie-zfs-root
• https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/wiki/Ubuntu-16.04-Root-on-ZFS
• https://janvrany.github.io/2016/10/fun-with-zfs-part-1-installing-debian-jessie-on-zfs-root.html