System Installation

  1. Optional: wipe solid-state drives with the generic tool blkdiscard, to clean previous partition tables and improve performance.

    All content will be irrevocably destroyed:

    for i in ${DISK}; do
blkdiscard -f $i &
done
wait

    This is a quick operation and should be completed under one minute.

    For other device specific methods, see Memory cell clearing

  2. Partition the disks. See Overview for details:

    for i in ${DISK}; do
sgdisk --zap-all $i
sgdisk -n1:1M:+${INST_PARTSIZE_ESP}G -t1:EF00 $i
sgdisk -n2:0:+${INST_PARTSIZE_BPOOL}G -t2:BE00 $i
if [ "${INST_PARTSIZE_SWAP}" != "" ]; then
    sgdisk -n4:0:+${INST_PARTSIZE_SWAP}G -t4:8200 $i
fi
if [ "${INST_PARTSIZE_RPOOL}" = "" ]; then
    sgdisk -n3:0:0   -t3:BF00 $i
else
    sgdisk -n3:0:+${INST_PARTSIZE_RPOOL}G -t3:BF00 $i
fi
sgdisk -a1 -n5:24K:+1000K -t5:EF02 $i
done

  3. Create boot pool:

    zpool create \
    -o compatibility=grub2 \
    -o ashift=12 \
    -o autotrim=on \
    -O acltype=posixacl \
    -O canmount=off \
    -O compression=lz4 \
    -O devices=off \
    -O normalization=formD \
    -O relatime=on \
    -O xattr=sa \
    -O mountpoint=/boot \
    -R /mnt \
    bpool_$INST_UUID \
    $INST_VDEV \
    $(for i in ${DISK}; do
       printf "$i-part2 ";
      done)

    You should not need to customize any of the options for the boot pool.

    GRUB does not support all of the zpool features. See spa_feature_names in grub-core/fs/zfs/zfs.c. This step creates a separate boot pool for /boot with the features limited to only those that GRUB supports, allowing the root pool to use any/all features.

    Features enabled with -o compatibility=grub2 can be seen here.

  4. Create root pool:

    zpool create \
    -o ashift=12 \
    -o autotrim=on \
    -R /mnt \
    -O acltype=posixacl \
    -O canmount=off \
    -O compression=zstd \
    -O dnodesize=auto \
    -O normalization=formD \
    -O relatime=on \
    -O xattr=sa \
    -O mountpoint=/ \
    rpool_$INST_UUID \
    $INST_VDEV \
   $(for i in ${DISK}; do
      printf "$i-part3 ";
     done)

    Notes:

    • The use of ashift=12 is recommended here because many drives today have 4 KiB (or larger) physical sectors, even though they present 512 B logical sectors. Also, a future replacement drive may have 4 KiB physical sectors (in which case ashift=12 is desirable) or 4 KiB logical sectors (in which case ashift=12 is required).

    • Setting -O acltype=posixacl enables POSIX ACLs globally. If you do not want this, remove that option, but later add -o acltype=posixacl (note: lowercase “o”) to the zfs create for /var/log, as journald requires ACLs

    • Setting normalization=formD eliminates some corner cases relating to UTF-8 filename normalization. It also implies utf8only=on, which means that only UTF-8 filenames are allowed. If you care to support non-UTF-8 filenames, do not use this option. For a discussion of why requiring UTF-8 filenames may be a bad idea, see The problems with enforced UTF-8 only filenames.

    • recordsize is unset (leaving it at the default of 128 KiB). If you want to tune it (e.g. -o recordsize=1M), see these various blog posts.

    • Setting relatime=on is a middle ground between classic POSIX atime behavior (with its significant performance impact) and atime=off (which provides the best performance by completely disabling atime updates). Since Linux 2.6.30, relatime has been the default for other filesystems. See RedHat’s documentation for further information.

    • Setting xattr=sa vastly improves the performance of extended attributes. Inside ZFS, extended attributes are used to implement POSIX ACLs. Extended attributes can also be used by user-space applications. They are used by some desktop GUI applications. They can be used by Samba to store Windows ACLs and DOS attributes; they are required for a Samba Active Directory domain controller. Note that xattr=sa is Linux-specific. If you move your xattr=sa pool to another OpenZFS implementation besides ZFS-on-Linux, extended attributes will not be readable (though your data will be). If portability of extended attributes is important to you, omit the -O xattr=sa above. Even if you do not want xattr=sa for the whole pool, it is probably fine to use it for /var/log.

    • Make sure to include the -part3 portion of the drive path. If you forget that, you are specifying the whole disk, which ZFS will then re-partition, and you will lose the bootloader partition(s).

  5. This section implements dataset layout as described in overview.

    Create root system container:

    • Unencrypted:

      zfs create \
 -o canmount=off \
 -o mountpoint=none \
 rpool_$INST_UUID/$INST_ID

    • Encrypted:

      Pick a strong password. Once compromised, changing password will not keep your data safe. See zfs-change-key(8) for more info:

      zfs create \
 -o canmount=off \
 -o mountpoint=none \
 -o encryption=on \
 -o keylocation=prompt \
 -o keyformat=passphrase \
 rpool_$INST_UUID/$INST_ID

    Create other system datasets:

    zfs create -o canmount=off -o mountpoint=none bpool_$INST_UUID/$INST_ID
zfs create -o canmount=off -o mountpoint=none bpool_$INST_UUID/$INST_ID/BOOT
zfs create -o canmount=off -o mountpoint=none rpool_$INST_UUID/$INST_ID/ROOT
zfs create -o canmount=off -o mountpoint=none rpool_$INST_UUID/$INST_ID/DATA
zfs create -o mountpoint=/boot -o canmount=noauto bpool_$INST_UUID/$INST_ID/BOOT/default
zfs create -o mountpoint=/ -o canmount=off    rpool_$INST_UUID/$INST_ID/DATA/default
zfs create -o mountpoint=/ -o canmount=noauto rpool_$INST_UUID/$INST_ID/ROOT/default
zfs mount rpool_$INST_UUID/$INST_ID/ROOT/default
zfs mount bpool_$INST_UUID/$INST_ID/BOOT/default
for i in {usr,var,var/lib};
do
    zfs create -o canmount=off rpool_$INST_UUID/$INST_ID/DATA/default/$i
done
for i in {home,root,srv,usr/local,var/log,var/spool};
do
    zfs create -o canmount=on rpool_$INST_UUID/$INST_ID/DATA/default/$i
done
chmod 750 /mnt/root

  6. Format and mount ESP:

    for i in ${DISK}; do
 mkfs.vfat -n EFI ${i}-part1
 mkdir -p /mnt/boot/efis/${i##*/}-part1
 mount -t vfat ${i}-part1 /mnt/boot/efis/${i##*/}-part1
done

mkdir -p /mnt/boot/efi
mount -t vfat ${INST_PRIMARY_DISK}-part1 /mnt/boot/efi

  7. Create optional user data datasets to omit data from rollback:

    zfs create -o canmount=on rpool_$INST_UUID/$INST_ID/DATA/default/var/games
zfs create -o canmount=on rpool_$INST_UUID/$INST_ID/DATA/default/var/www
# for GNOME
zfs create -o canmount=on rpool_$INST_UUID/$INST_ID/DATA/default/var/lib/AccountsService
# for Docker
zfs create -o canmount=on rpool_$INST_UUID/$INST_ID/DATA/default/var/lib/docker
# for NFS
zfs create -o canmount=on rpool_$INST_UUID/$INST_ID/DATA/default/var/lib/nfs
# for LXC
zfs create -o canmount=on rpool_$INST_UUID/$INST_ID/DATA/default/var/lib/lxc
# for LibVirt
zfs create -o canmount=on rpool_$INST_UUID/$INST_ID/DATA/default/var/lib/libvirt
##other application
# zfs create -o canmount=on rpool_$INST_UUID/$INST_ID/DATA/default/var/lib/$name

    Add other datasets when needed, such as PostgreSQL.

  8. Install base packages:

    dnf --installroot=/mnt --releasever=${INST_FEDORA_VER} -y install \
https://zfsonlinux.org/fedora/zfs-release.fc${INST_FEDORA_VER}.noarch.rpm \
@core grub2-efi-x64 grub2-pc-modules grub2-efi-x64-modules shim-x64 efibootmgr cryptsetup \
kernel kernel-devel python3-dnf-plugin-post-transaction-actions

  9. Install ZFS:

    dnf --installroot=/mnt -y install zfs zfs-dracut