Recently, I obtained a 64-bit ARM, budget Linux laptop, the Pinebook Pro. It’s a wonderful, sleek little notebook, boasting great convenience and power-efficiency. I enjoy using it so much, it’s becoming my main machine, and I’d love love to put all of my music, audiobooks, pictures, and ebooks on it. The only problem being my media takes up a bit more than the 64 GiB available on the machine’s built-in eMMC. With a spacious microSD card in-hand, I knew it was time to get more experience with my new filesystem of choice ZFS.

Tutorial

This tutorial describes the steps required to install ZFS on a Pinebook Pro running the tailored version of Manjaro KDE.

Install

The ZFS software is readily available as a DKMS module for the arm64 architecture. The following instructions detail how to install the ZFS DKMS module.

  1. First, install DKMS on the Pinebook Pro.[1]

    $ sudo pacman -S dkms linux-pinebookpro-headers

  2. The yay tool provides a nifty way to install packages from the AUR.

    $ sudo pacman -S yay

  3. Then, install the zfs-dkms-any package from the AUR.

    $ yay -S zfs-dkms-any

Configure

It’s likely you want to have ZFS available without having to explicitly load the DKMS module, import pools, and mount datasets every time you restart your computer. These next steps describe exactly how to avoid such nonsense.

  1. To load the ZFS DKMS module at boot, create the appropriate file for systemd.[2]

    /etc/modules-load.d/zfs.conf
    # Load ZFS at boot
zfs

  2. Enable importing pools and mounting datasets at boot.[3]

    $ sudo systemctl enable zfs-import-cache
$ sudo systemctl enable zfs-import.target
$ sudo systemctl enable zfs-mount
$ sudo systemctl enable zfs.target

Next Steps

See External Storage on the Pinebook Pro with ZFS to learn how to use ZFS to store your files on a microSD card.

1. Arch Linux Wiki: Dynamic Kernel Module Support
2. Arch Linux Wiki: Kernel Module - Automatic Module Loading with systemd
3. Arch Linux Wiki: ZFS - Automatic Start