kubuntu-council team mailing list archive

[Rick Timmis <ricktimmis68@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello Council, and Development

The Kubuntu Focus team have been doing some exciting work, and I would be
very much interested in your feedback on the following


---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Michael Mikowski <mmikowski@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2022, 20:09
Subject: Disk Setup for 22.04
To: Rick Timmis <ricktimmis68@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Erich Eickmeyer <eeickmeyer@xxxxxxxxxx>


Hi Rick:

I hope all is well with you and your family!

I wanted to check with you and with the council to see if you and they
agree or have suggestions on a proposal:

As you know, we and our customers often wish they could have a
'last-good-state' snapshot that they could roll back to in the case of
trouble. We have created this capability in Proof Of Concepts (POCs) using
both luks + btrfs and luks + lvm + ext4. We are also considering zfs + zfs
encryption, but have yet to pursue it.

Could you please share your thoughts and what you feel might be the best
next steps forward?  All of these would require some scripting before
installation because we need a somewhat more sophisticated setup than
standard. Here are the changes:

   - luks + lvm + ext4: This is very nearly standard. We just add a custom
   partition script before installation. There is no post-install work. We
   have already written the snapshot code that would tie into a GUI.
   - luks + btrfs: This requires a custom partition script before
   installation and post-install script to finish setting up cryptfs and
   initramrd. There is a good ecosystem with snapper and apt-snap-rollback.
   - zfs + zfs encryption: This is the least studied. We requested input
   from ubuntu-devel, and got some suggestions from ahasenack. However, we
   would *love* to ship with ZFS if that is possible and supported by the
   council and Canonical. We plan to contact Monica to determine if this is an
   interest up stream.

In all cases, the base system would support snapshots and rollbacks, and we
would create or use hooks to provide a last-known-good-snapshot tool at the
minimum.

So, waddaya think? Any suggestions on how to progress?

Cheers, Mike

ps. FOSDEM was fun! Thanks so much for the opportunity.  We discussed this
initiative there and the response was strongly favorable. We will also ping
Monica to see if there is upstream interest in ZFS as a flagship product.