ZFS on partition of a single disk

OpenZFS
1

I am using ZFS for my home directory on my desktop. This makes backing up my home directory super easy with snapshots and sending the dataset to my NAS. Right now I have Pop!_OS installed on one drive (EXT4) and ZFS on another (for my home directory). I’m moving to a laptop that only has 1 disk, so this setup isn’t possible. I’d like to keep using ZFS, it seems like my options are to install with ZFSBootMenu (which I can’t find documentation to install Pop!_OS with) or make a ZFS pool with just a partition of the boot drive. Any thoughts on these options? Are there other options I can’t think of? I’d like to keep using Pop!_OS, as I love the window tiling and can’t find another option that works as well for me.

Thanks!

2

I use ZFS on a single disk with my laptop. I have three partitions:

Number  Start    End         Size        File system  Name       Flags
 1      1.00MiB  2.00MiB     1.00MiB                  bios_grub  bios_grub
 2      2.00MiB  262MiB      260MiB      fat32        boot_grub
 3      262MiB   1907728MiB  1907466MiB               zfs_part

I use standard Grub with the ZFS init-scripts to boot the root dataset:

BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-6.9.9-amd64 boot=zfs root=zfs=rpool/debian preempt=full  ro quiet
3

Toot my own horn here a bit … Everything at home and a fair amount at work is root-on-zfs, based on my setup script

My laptops are all done this way with zfs native encryption. Servers at home no encryption (yet).

Have a look. It’s an opinionated setup, but the choices make sense I think.

It’s Ubuntu-based, but should be pretty easy to handle PopOS as well. Change the repo definitions, and maybe a few package choices.

4

Using just one partition works fine, if you don’t really care about having ZFS on root. It’s what I most often do.

5

Don’t know if this helps, but someone created a script to move Pop!_OS install to ZFSbootmenu setup.

It uses zfsbootmenu info to create the pool / datatsets for ROOT and home. Then rsync to copy over root and /home data for Pop!_OS.

6

Thanks for all the suggestions. I first installed Ubuntu 24.04 with ZFSBootMenu, but I couldn’t get it to boot the pool on the laptop. I tried for a bunch of different things, no luck. So then I installed Pop!_OS, resized the partition, and created a zfs pool with the remaining space for my home directories. This system will work for now, though I was excited to try ZFSBootMenu

7

You mentioned you unsuccessfully tried to install zfsbootmenu on ubuntu 24.04 but couldn’t get it to boot. You could try the following install script for zfsbootmenu on ubuntu 24.04 and see if that works.

8

I got it to boot on my desktop, but not my laptop. I tried redoing the EFI boot entries, I tried changing the bootloader to EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI, no luck.

9

You can absolutely create a pool on just a partition.

If you want to go for ZBM, and i highly recommend you do, there is a Copy in procedure for Linux Mint 22 on ZBM,

https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxmint/comments/1lsx35z/mint_22_on_zfsbootmenu/

I would assume pop would be similar if not identical?