Dual booting with ZFSBootMenu

OpenZFS
1

I installed Ubuntu 24.04 through ZFSBootMenu on my XPS 13 9380 laptop. Here is the ZFS “layout”

me@xps:~$ zfs list
NAME                USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT
zroot               198G  1.56T    96K  none
zroot/ROOT         11.9G  1.56T    96K  none
zroot/ROOT/ubuntu  8.82G  1.56T  7.02G  /
zroot/home          186G  1.56T   170G  /home

Would installing Fedora alongside the existing Ubuntu install work? My idea is to create
zroot/ROOT/fedora, reuse the zroot/home and have a different username in Fedora, so that the home folders don’t clash. Or is there a better way to go around this, to have a separate zroot/home? Then I would need a way to only mount zroot/home in Ubuntu and zroot/homeFedora in Fedora.

Thank you for reading and any recommendations/comments.

1 Like
2

All you need to do is zfs rename zroot/home zroot/ROOT/ubuntu/home and zfs inherit mountpoint zroot/ROOT/ubuntu/home to make your existing home unique to that installation. It’ll still have a separate dataset, which is nice! But it won’t get mounted if you boot from zroot/ROOT/fedora.

I would recommend actually creating a dataset zroot/ROOT/fedora/home though. It’ll automatically inherit the mountpoint, you don’t need to manually do that again.

If you don’t create the dataset, you’ll still have a separate /home under fedora, you just won’t be able to snapshot and or roll back it and the fedora installation itself independently of one another.

1 Like
3

Thank you for your reply! I will try it out and report back.
Moving zroot/home under zroot/ROOT/ubuntu/home makes much more sense to me by default, even without dual-boot. Any clue why they have it separate as per their documentation?

Quote:

zfs create -o mountpoint=none zroot/ROOT
zfs create -o mountpoint=/ -o canmount=noauto zroot/ROOT/${ID}
zfs create -o mountpoint=/home zroot/home

zpool set bootfs=zroot/ROOT/${ID} zroot
4

It’s a personal choice. Keeping home entirely separate means you can recursively roll back the root and any children without affecting home.

There are also a lot of people who (IMO foolishly) DELIBERATELY share /home WITH the same UIDs and usernames across distros… Which works surprisingly well, until suddenly one day it very much doesn’t.