Debian Trixie Root on ZFS

[chrisstornowski]

Hi team.

Debian Trixie was recently released as stable and the how-to «Debian Trixie Root on ZFS» is missing.

[wommy]

i can help

im guessing its just fork the bookworm one and sed it

theres probably a couple tweaks in sane defaults thatd be nice to optimize

[wommy]

also having a section on zbm would be a nice addition
i know theres some controversy around zbm only supporting x86,
but i think at least a mention or a footnote is called for

there are slight differences in between zbm's method and openZFS's
zbm's is rather barebones,
while the openZFS's is rather opinionated and full featured

i recently came across @NLaundry 's automated script
i feel like, with some tweaks it could be like the openZFS convience script,
kinda similar to dockers One Two

which might help with adoption and general best practices,
as its often easier to set up zfs correctly, than to fix it after the fact;
an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure

EDIT: i found a gist where i put the two side by side from a few months ago, so it should be pretty current

in summary
i think alot of care should be taken around structing the new trixie document

1 having more or less options - i think this could be really dialed in
a with or without boot on zfs
b with or without encryption
i zfs encryption
ii lvm encryption

2 having 9 steps is pretty crazy, 28 page_up/downs is alot,
and yes, most of that are variants or options, plus some header/footer, plus some setup & up to speed
but still, its hard to grok, and most would probably say daunting
but i love zfs and its not scary and would love to help more people use it / bring it to more people

i think the interplay between these two are key to that

like if there was a convience script type of thing, with a couple variants,
i think that would define the lane really strongly,
so periphery providers, ala zbm,
could instead focus on their lane

[avclicky]

Just a note that upgrading from Debian 12 "Bookworm" to 13 "Trixie" was uneventful for me with an important caveat.

Trixie introduced the deb822 format for defining apt sources. If you elect to transition to this while upgrading, you will need to add "contrib" to the Components value of e.g. /etc/apt/sources.list.d/debian.sources early in the upgrade process or else you may encounter problems booting.

I neglected to do this and had to chroot in from the Live CD with the mountpoints in the right places, add that to debian.sources, and then apt reinstall zfs-dkms.

[wommy]

I have this all typed up somewhere at home. i got sucked into tuning my zpool options n my build steps - I'll submit in the morning.

i did notice a few peculiarities but it's out of mind at the moment