About ZFS in Squeeze (2)

Sometimes it’s nice being wrong. Contrary to what I predicted, ZFS will be supported in Debian Squeeze using the official installer.

This means that Debian Squeeze will be one of the first GNU distributions to support ZFS.

In fact, even though ZFS support didn’t make it to Debian-Installer beta1 by the time it was released, it is now available in the netboot images (this happens because netboot images fetch newer installer components from the internet).

As a consequence of this my unofficial installer can now be considered obsolete.

So why did I say something that turned out to be grossly inaccurate? It’s not due to anyone’s fault really. At that time, the version of Parted that included ZFS detection hadn’t migrated to Squeeze. The unblock policy didn’t appear to allow this migration. However, the Release Team kindly decided to make an exception that allowed this, and after Parted had migrated the changes in Debian-Installer itself went in quite smoothly.

Re: The Freaky Wall

Heya Sergio

Your blog doesn’t allow comments :-( so I reply here. First off, thanks for being one of the first Debian developers in trying out my modified installer with ZFS support, you guys made my day!

Some quick notes on the bugs you found:

The “missing //@ prefix” bug is #600578, fixed in upstream, in sid and in squeeze. Thanks :-)

The “boot partition stays in /target/boot in final install” bug is not in BTS. It was present in a preliminar version of partman-zfs which was never uploaded. The version currently in the archive correctly uses “altroot” option to fix this.

The “/lib/modules is needed for boot” problem was reported as #600568, but I haven’t been able to persuade the kFreeBSD maintainers that this is necessary. It’s not critical anyway.

Glad you finally got a working setup.