[Issue] Snapshot-Booting seem not to work

[hasechris]

Hi :)

first of all: Normal boot works perfectly - and with a really hard system config.

I'm successfully using

• Manjaro
• rEFInd Bootloader
• Unified Kernel Image complete with kernel cmdline baked in
• Luks Container on Partition (cant use the whole disk because of multiboot with windows)
• ZFS in LUKS Container
• Secure Boot enabled - enrolled own keys with sbctl along the Microsoft and Vendor (Framework 16) one's - signing my unified kernel images with sbctl - sbctl has a mkinitcpio hook.

Sadly the snapshot booting of sd-zfs seems to not work.

I'm creating an additional kernel uki image with the modified cmdline for the zfs snapshot name (wrote my own pacman hook script for this).

Booting this custom kernel in with the cmdline just modified for the snapshot gives me a whole lot of normal boot messages until a point where the system does not seem to proceed - but with no error or "systemd - Waiting on Service xxx" messages.

Booting this custom kernel into rescue target will get me a rescue shell where i can see that the snapshot dataset was successfully created, but not all needed zfs datasets are mounted.

I then mount them manually, which works, and then try to continue booting with systemctl isolate multi-user.target. Sadly i dont get anymore boot messages and the laptop seems to be "frozen" - the cursor is still blinking but the computer does not respond to anything. Have to hard poweroff it.

I really dont know how to debug this problem because i dont get any error or have any log which i could check (At least thats what I'm thinking - I'm not certain regarding logs). Also because of my really complicated setup I really dont know which infos to drop here in this issue because that would be so much. So please feel free to ask for information.

Best regards
hasechris

[hasechris]

ow, forgot to add the latest info here.

I debugged the problem in vscode and found the culprit to be the initrd_zfs mounter programm. I doubt that this code regarding sub-datasets ever worked but maybe that could be traced down to be a change from zfs upstream or something - BUT that does not really matter. What matters is, this code no longer works correctly.

Sadly I'm no C-Programmer, so I'm waiting on a friend of mine to have some time so he can help me in fixing the code. When I'm ready i will open a Pull Request.

@dasJ Would it be possible and ok for you if I would help in this repo in the future regarding issues and possible fixes/code merging? It seems to me you are quite busy and dont have time anymore for this sideproject. There are quite a lot of issues already here and also some pull requests.

Best regards
hasechris

[ciphorg]

I believe the original maintainer of this library has completely abandoned this. I would consider using dracut and dracuts zfs module if you want a systemd solution for zfs.