Arch Linux User Repository

I will have to add a warning to my earlier enthusiasm: rc12 doesn't seem to be useable as a root fs - or at least not as far as I have tried. Since I somewhat doubt that there are a lot of (if any) people besides me who try to run Arch on ZFS, so this shouldn't be too important. Just thought I 'd mention it.

I think you should add your repository information to the wiki. It would be helpful for newcomers to ZFS without having to search through this page's comments.

@proxypoke, thanks for the notification! The packages have been updated to 0.6.0-rc12. I have been working creating a unofficial repository for the Arch ZFS kernel modules. The database and packages are signed with my PGP key, see http://demizerone.com/archzfs/ for more info and instructions on how to add my repository to pacman and add my key (0EE7A125) to your keyring trust. My signed repository and packages are pre-built _x86_64 packages. See http://demizerone.com/archzfs/ for more info. The github master branch for the build tool is not yet up to date. I will have that up and ready sometime tomorrow. cheers

Good news, everyone! With the latest release of ZFS/SPL on Linux, 0.6.0-rc12 (available as of yesterday), everything builds completely fine on kernel 3.6.5 without the need for any patches. All PKGBUILDs (spl{,-utils}, zfs{,-utils}) require a quick :%s/rc11/rc12/, generation of new md5sums, and the preempt patch can be removed. Happy compiling!

Hey everybody, just a quick update. The new build tool I have been working on is now in master, https://github.com/demizer/aur-zfs. With it you can build and package two different groups of packages one for aur and one for split. Again, building the split packages is more efficient. I still have a lot of work to be done, but it is progressing. I will be adding git, dkms, and lts packages after I setup my repo. My next step is to add unofficial repository support to my build tool so I can easily setup a repo with precompiled binaries. I will be hosting the repo on my website at http://demizerone.com/archzfs. Initially it will only be for 64bit code since the ZOL FAQ states that ZOL is very unstable with 32bit code due to memory management differences in Solaris and Linux. I will notify you all in the future when that is ready to go. @MilanKnizek, Yes updating is a pain. ZFS itself is hard-coded to linux versions at build time. The ZFS build tool puts the modules in "/usr/lib/modules/3.5.6-1-ARCH/addon/zfs/", and this the primary reason it has to be rebuilt each upgrade, even minor point releases. Nvidia for example puts their module in "/usr/lib/modules/extramodules-3.5-ARCH/", so minor point releases are still good and the nvidia package doesn't need to be re-installed. A possible reason for ZOL to be hard-coded like this because ZOL is still technically very beta code. I do have a question for the community, does anyone use ZFS on a 32bit system? Thanks!

If you keep the linux, and linux-headers packages while using the LTS you don't need to modify the PKGBUILDs. Because the checks will pass but it will build the packages to your current runnning kernel.

All, if you're suffering zfs kernel upgrade pain & fatigue, seriously consider going with the LTS (long term support) kernel. I just successfully built zfs on a system that I switched to the linux-lts 3.0.48-1. All you have to do is install the linux-lts and linux-lts-headers packages, reboot to the lts kernel, and change any instances of depends= or makedepends= lines in the package build file like so: Before: depends=('linux>=3.5' "spl>=${pkgver}" "zfs-utils>=${pkgver}") makedepends=('linux-headers>=3.5') After: depends=('linux-lts>=3.0' "spl>=${pkgver}" "zfs-utils>=${pkgver}") makedepends=('linux-lts-headers>=3.0') Then build and install each package in this order: spl-utils,spl,zfs-utils,zfs. Worked like a champ for me.

@demizer: there still seemed to be a problem during upgrading - zfs/spl requires kernel of certain version (hard-coded) and this blocks the upgrade (the old installed zfs/spl requires the old kernel and kernel can't be upgraded w/o breaking dependency of zfs/spl and therefore build of the new zfs/spl fails, too). So far, I have had to remove zpl/spl, upgrade kernel, rebuild + install spl/zfs and manually run depmod against the new kernel (i.e. the postinst: depmod -a does not work until next reboot) and only then reboot to load the new kernel & zfs modules successfully. That is quite clumsy and error-prone - I hope it will be resolved via DMKS.

@modular, You're trying to build with the 3.6.2 kernel. The current version (rc11) does not work with the 3.6.2 kernel. If you want to use it, you will have to downgrade to the 3.5.6 kernel (linux and linux-headers). https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Downgrading_Packages Thanks!