Provisioning

After flashing the Alpine Linux extended ISO, partition the disks. For this action internet is required since zfs and sgdisk are not included on the extended ISO, therefore it needs to be obtained from the repository.

To set it up setup-interfaces and setup-apkrepos will be used.

# setup-interfaces -ar
# setup-apkrepos -c1

A few packages will have to be installed first:

# apk add zfs lsblk sgdisk wipefs dosfstools acpid mdadm

and load the ZFS kernel module

# modprobe zfs

Define the disks you want to use for this install

# export disks="/dev/disk/by-id/<id-disk-1> ... /dev/disk/by-id/<id-disk-n>"

with <id-disk-n> for n \in \mathbb{N} the id of the disk.

According to openzfs-FAQ using /dev/disk/by-id/ is the best practice for small pools. For larger pools, using serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and the like, see vdev_id for proper configuration.

Wipe the existing disk partitions

# for disk in $disks; do
> zpool labelclear -f $disk
> wipefs -a $disk
> sgdisk --zap-all $disk
> done

Create on each disk an EFI system partition (ESP) and a Linux filesystem partition

# for disk in $disks; do
> sgdisk -n 1:1m:+512m -t 1:ef00 $disk
> sgdisk -n 2:0:-10m -t 2:8300 $disk
> done

Create device nodes

# mdev -s

Define the EFI partitions

# export efiparts=""
# for disk in $disks; do
> efipart=${disk}-part-1
> efiparts="$efiparts $efipart"
> done

Create a mdraid array on the EFI partitions

# modprobe raid1
# mdadm --create --level 1 --metadata 1.0 --raid-devices <n> /dev/md/esp $efiparts
# mdadm --assemble --scan

Format the array with a FAT32 filesystem

# mkfs.fat -F 32 /dev/md/esp

ZFS pool creation

Define the pool partitions

# export poolparts=""
# for disk in $disks; do
> poolpart=${disk}-part-2
> poolparts="$poolparts $poolpart"
> done

Create the system pool

# zpool create -f \
    -o ashift=12 \
    -O compression=lz4 \
    -O acltype=posix \ 
    -O xattr=sa \
    -O dnodesize=auto \
    -m none \
    tank raidz1 $poolparts

Additionally, the spare option can be used to indicate spare disks. If more redundancy is preferred than raidz2 and raidz3 are possible alternatives for raidz1. If a single disk is used the raidz option can be left aside. For further information see zpool-create.

Then create the system datasets

# zfs create -o mountpoint=none tank/root
# zfs create -o canmount=noauto -o mountpoint=/ -o atime=off -o quota=24g tank/root/alpine
# zfs create -o mountpoint=/home -o atime=off -o setuid=off -o devices=off -o quota=<home-quota> -o encryption=on -o keyformat=passphrase tank/home
# zfs create -o mountpoint=/var -o exec=off -o setuid=off -o devices=off -o quota=16g tank/var

Setting the <home-quota> depends on the total size of the pool, generally try to reserve some empty space in the pool.

Finally, export the zpool

# zpool export tank

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Provisioning

ZFS pool creation

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