I’m not sure if this belongs in the newbie corner or not, but I’m curious what is the best practice for running EOS with btrfs using systemd-boot.
I recently installed EOS on my laptop (previously had Manjaro) and this is my first go with systemd-boot. I installed updates yesterday and shutdown my laptop then when I booted tonight systemd-boot only had an option to boot into firmware. I tried to repair with arch-chroot from the live disk and was able to determine that dracut was failing on zfs (it wasn’t installed) and not completing. I installed zfs then did reinstall-kernels and this resolved my issue.
I was searching to find if dracut requires zfs when I stumbled upon this post. So it seems that I have no benefit to using btrfs as my system is now.
I have 2 questions. What is the best practice setup for EOS with btrfs and systemd-boot? Does dracut require zfs to function properly?
There is nothing special required. systemd-boot is filesystem independent.
Absolutely not. Do you have any zfs filesystems from another install? It is possible it is detecting a zfs filesystem and trying to install the drivers for it.
You could try telling dracut to exclude the zfs module.
Is it worthwhile to change to mkinitcpio to be able to boot from snapshots? Presumably the EOS team with with dracut over mkinitcpio for a reason, but I’m not sure what I would be missing. I can look into that myself though.
I don’t have any zfs filesystems on this laptop. I did copy a bunch of stuff from home folder on my Manjaro installation I previously had. That system had LXD installed with a ZFS loop device, but I don’t have that on the new disk I put EOS on.
Ok, it turns out that second paragraph isn’t 100% correct. Something in my profile has some of my old LXD config because the loop devices are showing in lsblk. I will look into this on my end.