Fedora

Contents

Installation

Note: this is for installing ZFS on an existing Fedora installation. To use ZFS as root file system, see below.

  1. If zfs-fuse from official Fedora repo is installed, remove it first. It is not maintained and should not be used under any circumstance:

    rpm -e --nodeps zfs-fuse

  2. Add ZFS repo:

    dnf install -y https://zfsonlinux.org/fedora/zfs-release-3-0$(rpm --eval "%{dist}").noarch.rpm

    List of old zfs-release RPMs are available here.

  3. Install kernel headers:

    dnf install -y kernel-devel-$(uname -r | awk -F'-' '{print $1}')

    kernel-devel package must be installed before zfs package.

  4. Install ZFS packages:

    dnf install -y zfs

  5. Load kernel module:

    modprobe zfs

    If kernel module can not be loaded, your kernel version might be not yet supported by OpenZFS.

    An option is to an LTS kernel from COPR, provided by a third-party. Use it at your own risk:

    # this is a third-party repo!
# you have been warned.
#
# select a kernel from
# https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/kwizart/

dnf copr enable -y kwizart/kernel-longterm-VERSION
dnf install -y kernel-longterm kernel-longterm-devel

    Reboot to new LTS kernel, then load kernel module:

    modprobe zfs

  6. By default ZFS kernel modules are loaded upon detecting a pool. To always load the modules at boot:

    echo zfs > /etc/modules-load.d/zfs.conf

  7. By default ZFS may be removed by kernel package updates. To lock the kernel version to only ones supported by ZFS to prevent this:

    echo 'zfs' > /etc/dnf/protected.d/zfs.conf

    Pending non-kernel updates can still be applied:

    dnf update --exclude=kernel*

Latest Repositories (Fedora 41+)

zfs-latest repository contains the latest released version of OpenZFS which is under active development. It will contain the newest features, and is considered stable, but will have less real-world testing use than zfs-legacy. This repository is equivalent to the default zfs repository for Fedora. Packages from the latest repository can be installed as follows.

For Fedora 41 and newer run:

sudo dnf config-manager setopt zfs*.enabled=0
sudo dnf config-manager setopt zfs-latest.enabled=1
sudo dnf install zfs

Legacy Repositories (Fedora 41+)

zfs-legacy repository contains the previous released version of OpenZFS which is still being actively updated. Typically, this repository provides same packages as primary zfs repository for RHEL- and CentOS-based distribution. Packages from the legacy repository can be installed as follows.

For Fedora 41 and newer run:

sudo dnf config-manager setopt zfs*.enabled=0
sudo dnf config-manager setopt zfs-legacy.enabled=1
sudo dnf install zfs

Version Specific Repositories (Fedora 41+)

Version specific repositories are provided for users who wants to run a specific branch (e.g. 2.3.x) of ZFS. Packages from the version specific repository can be installed as follows.

For Fedora 41 and newer, to enable version specific repository for ZFS branch x.y, run:

sudo dnf config-manager setopt zfs*.enabled=0
sudo dnf config-manager setopt zfs-x.y.enabled=1
sudo dnf install zfs

Testing Repository (DEPRECATED)

zfs-testing repository is DEPRECATED in favor of ‘zfs-latest’.

Root on ZFS