Install ZFS Packages

Instructions on how to install our ZFS packages.

ZFS#

ZFS is a centrepiece on our storage design. BtrFS is not there yet. While Ubuntu 22.04 supports OpenZFS v2, these packages provide updated versions.

The package builds themselves are driven by the OpenZFS make targets, so our changes include:

• Properly set package metadata, including defined package dependencies as the native build task converts them from rpm and it loses important information.
• Package signatures as part of our publishing process.

The installation is straightforward:

sudo apt install zfs zfs-dkms

zfs-dkms builds the actual kernel module for the ZFS driver. Note that on the first run, the zfs module is not automatically loaded, therefore, it needs to be manually loaded:

sudo modprobe zfs

Supported distributions#

Our builds were made under Ubuntu 22.04. Support for other related Debian-derrivatives may be limited in case of glibc mismatch.

This is not an issue with the kernel modules as this is delivered as dkms package and the modules are built on each machine based on the installed kernel. This may be an issue for the supporting tooling (zpool, zfs, etc).