Backstory Link to heading
ArchZFS, the default go-to for most users looking to use ZFS on Arch, recently went through a significant change, resulting in a disruption where no updates were provided for several months.
Due to unknown reasons, the primary maintainer @minextu who had been reliably maintaining ArchZFS for several years stopped responding to messages or making updates. Whatever the reason is that they are missing, the Arch community owes a huge thanks to them for their work over the years.
When it became clear that the existing maintainer was not returning, the community banded together. Several previous contributors, who had been a large part of the maintenance effort, stepped in to help revive the project (archzfs/archzfs#545).
The project has changed it’s infrastructure to be less reliant on other systems besides GitHub, moving builds to GitHub actions.
Transition Link to heading
In the several months that ArchZFS was not providing updates I switched to zfs-dkms. However, using zfs-dkms comes with some risks that could result in an unusable system. When using the ArchZFS repo users can feel more confident that the installed binaries will not leave them with a unusable system. For this reason I prefer to use the binary packages provided by the ArchZFS repo. While the new builds are still tagged as experimental, it’s great to see them return. However, proceed with caution.
The process of switching back to ArchZFS from dkms was fairly simple (I use linux-lts, replace with linux accordingly):
Remove zfs-dkms:
# pacman -Rdd zfs-dkms zfs-utils
Add repo:
Add the following to /etc/pacman.conf:
[archzfs]
SigLevel = Required
Server = https://github.com/archzfs/archzfs/releases/download/experimental
Import the current ArchZFS signing key and sign it locally:
# pacman-key --init
# pacman-key --recv-keys 3A9917BF0DED5C13F69AC68FABEC0A1208037BE9
# pacman-key --lsign-key 3A9917BF0DED5C13F69AC68FABEC0A1208037BE9
Install:
# pacman -S zfs-linux-lts
Update
# pacman -Syu