SystemRescue+ZFS

SystemRescue+ZFS is a fork of the SystemRescue Linux distribution (based on Arch Linux) with improvements such as:

• ZFS support built-in
• Serial console enabled at the bootloader stage
• Shortened automatic boot timeout of 30 seconds
• Build process improvements
• Extra polish

Serial Console

Serial I/O is enabled by default on COM1/ttyS0 at 115,200 baud. If your serial console is on another port or requires a different speed, make adjustments in the following places and rebuild the image.

1. GRUB (UEFI boot): serial --speed=115200 efi0 in ./efiboot/grub/grubsrcd.cfg
2. SYSLINUX (BIOS boot): SERIAL 0 115200 in ./syslinux/sysresccd_head.cfg
3. Kernel (post-boot): console=ttyS0,115200 in ./build.sh

Building

$ sudo ./build.sh -v

Dependencies

• Arch Linux with the following packages installed:
  • arch-install-scripts
  • archiso (in a version matching these patches)
  • base-devel
  • grub
  • mkinitcpio-archiso (for archiso versions ≥ 45)
  • mtools
• archiso with these patches applied.
• This key (to avoid an "unknown trust" error during building of the archzfs package).

Rebuilds

The state of successfully completed build steps is persisted in ./work/build.make_* files. If such a file is present for a given build step, ./build.sh will skip that step indefinitely going forward. Before a rebuild, you must remove these state files to ensure that the appropriate build steps are re-executed and any customizations actually take effect.

• Full rebuild (recommended): # rm ./work/build.make_*
• Partial rebuild: Delete the state file for the earliest affected step and all steps that come after it. For example, if you have customized the GRUB (UEFI boot) configuration, you must remove build.make_efi and its successors build.make_efiboot, build.make_prepare and build.make_iso.

Steps

1. make_pacman_conf
2. make_basefs
3. make_packages
4. make_customize_airootfs
5. make_setup_mkinitcpio
6. make_boot
7. make_boot_extra
8. make_syslinux
9. make_isolinux
10. make_efi
11. make_efiboot
12. make_prepare
13. make_iso