[aeadio]

Worth mentioning aside Alpine (and other small Linuxes) supporting ZFS just fine, we also have ZFSBootMenu, which is frankly a hell of a lot better than the boot environment experience in FreeBSD.

https://docs.zfsbootmenu.org

From within the bootloader's interactive (fzf-based) menu, you can:

    * Select boot environment (and change the default boot environment)
    * Select specific kernels within each boot environment (and change the default kernel)  
    * Edit kernel command line temporarily  
    * Roll back boot environments to a previous snapshot  
    * Rewind to a pool checkpoint  
    * Create, destroy, promote and orphan boot environments  
    * Diff boot environments to some previous snapshot to see all file changes  
    * View pool health / status  
    * Jump into a chroot of a boot environment  
    * Get a recovery shell with a full suite of tools available including zfs and zpool, in addition to many helper scripts for managing your pool/datasets and getting things back into a working state before either relaunching the boot menu, or just directly booting into the selected dataset/kernel/initrd pair.

It also supports 100% of ZFS features that the host system supports, since it uses the ZFS kmod. That includes native encryption.

[vermaden]

I have seen what ZFSBootMenu can do and I really like it.

Its just 'crazy' to me that there are ZERO Linux distributions that install as root on ZFS with ZFSBootMenu and enabled ZFS Boot Environments.

None. Zero. Why?

[aeadio]

They're afraid of the hypothetical legal threat from Oracle, which largely seems to come from a lot of license misinterpretation and urban myth.

Seems like the only ones that have ventured to ship a ZFS binary are Canonical, and their implementation seems to be done by people that didn't understand ZFS and have no interest in understanding it.

It's really a shame. OpenZFS on Linux really has excellent support and integration, arguably as good as or better than FreeBSD and Illumos, and has this excellent bootloader.

Still, ZFS has good out-of-tree support in distros like Void and Alpine, where the users can take it upon themselves to do a good root-on-ZFS setup and reap the benefits.

[vermaden]

The iXsystems do that in TrueNAS SCALE on Debian Linux.

Here:

- https://i.imgur.com/c4WUwb1.png

Unfortunately there is no command like bectl(8) or beadm(8) to manage that.

You have to do that from the WebUI:

- https://i.imgur.com/2JhZ6VB.png

Hope that helps.