ZFS testing on Sabayon

At the time of writing, Sabayon ships the stable version of ZFS-on-Linux, 0.7.13. A new 0.8.0 release dropped a couple weeks ago, with some long-awaited features:

• Native ZFS encryption (including zero-knowledge send/recv support for off-site backups)
• SSD TRIM support
• Direct IO

Given the major changes to the code and this is a point-zero release, Sabayon is not yet shipping 0.8.0 in the main repositories, and probably won’t be for a while yet to come. In the meantime, if you want to test the new features, we have a new ZFS SCR repository available. This contains the latest zfs and zfs-kmod packages for the current Sabayon kernel (5.0).

If you’d like to try this for yourself, the commands required to install ZFS-on-Linux on Sabayon are:

# Install the 5.0 kernel, if you've not already done so
kernel-switcher linux-sabayon:5.0 -a
# Enable the ZFS SCR repository
enman enable zfs
equo update zfs
# Install the ZFS packages
equo install zfs zfs-kmod -a
# Enable ZFS services on startup
systemctl enable zfs.target
# Reboot to the new kernel
reboot

Note: SCR repositories are unofficial content and contain packages which may not have been tested, and use of packages within is at your own risk. You may wish to try them out on a test computer first. Beware also that ZFS 0.8.0 is new and may contain bugs which eat your data.