Hacker News Reader

I still wait for ANY Linux distro that would have installer that would allow you to install Linux with Root on ZFS and with ZFSBootMenu (or any other ZFS Boot Environments tool) ...

View on HN

I would love to see that too, but believe this is rather unlikely for any major Linux distro. Why? Because there is no guarantee the required kernel symbols will stay available.

This has for example happened with the linux-rt branch that decided to change the license of some of the exported kernel symbols to GPL, which prevents the ZFS module from compiling.

As far as I can tell, the kernel developers make sure to not break user space but no such guarantees are given for the kernel modules. Having the driver for your root file system possibly not compile on the next kernel update seems like a nightmare to support for any distribution.

> I would love to see that too, but believe this is rather unlikely for any major Linux distro. Why? Because there is no guarantee the required kernel symbols will stay available.

Er, Ubuntu already supports ZFS root out of the box in the default installer; why would ZBM be any harder to support than that?

I'm in the process of building a NixOS-like distro. I'm 90% certain mine will use these.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com