from Hacker News

Show HN: Zectl – ZFS Boot Environment Manager for Linux

by johnramsden on 3/18/20, 8:58 PM with 25 comments

• by cyberpunk on 3/18/20, 11:54 PM

  Finally. I got used to this on solaris 10 and missed it until FreeBSD got it.. ZFS and beadm are the included in the reasons i continue to run FreeBSD as a workstation, but these days with k8s and such I do tend to run a lot of linux VMs to do my daily work (devops stuff)...

  The work lappy runs ubuntu with zfs on root, and it's pretty seamless, I'm very much onboard with it having boot environments! (zsys)

• by _jal on 3/18/20, 9:40 PM

  This looks nice. Going to have to give it a try.

  I'd love to see automated ZFS-on-root setup, but suspect that'll have to come from Canonical if we ever get it.

• by kevans91 on 3/19/20, 3:54 AM

  Oh, this is cool! We'll need to check out this plugin mechanism as a thought for bectl -- it's fairly inflexible at the moment.

  libze_util_temporary_mount would be a good candidate for using (or being replaced by?) the recently-introduced zfs_mount_at in libzfs once that's widely available enough. That was a fairly trivial addition to libzfs that was initially made to support libbe's be_mount(), which previously used the effectively non-portable amount() [post-mortem: should read zmount, but autocorrect is alwayscorrect]

• by acd on 3/19/20, 7:56 AM

  Big thanks to the developers/John for creating ZFS Linux boot manager!

• by mskalski on 3/19/20, 9:02 AM

  Looks cool. Currently only one machine which I have with zfs is NixOS, which has it own mechanism to handle such versioning, or do you see some advantages of using zfs approach?

• by unixhero on 3/18/20, 9:57 PM

  With encryption support?