Ubuntu 14.04 - Install ZFS

ZFS is pretty straightforward to install. Before going ahead, please make sure that you are on the 3.19 kernel. The latest Ubuntu 14.04 installation images will have this, but older installations of ubuntu can be upgraded.

Run the command below to install ZFS.

sudo apt-get install python-software-properties -y
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:zfs-native/stable -y
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install ubuntu-zfs -y

ZFS works by adding modules to the kernel. This means that for the changes to take effect, you will need to reboot. It also means that later updates that fetch a newer kernel will take slightly longer as the kernel will be recompiled for ZFS.

You just updated the kernel, so you need to reboot in order for ZFS to work.

You can run the command below to check that ZFS has been installed.

dmesg | grep ZFS

You should see output similar to:

[  510.548586] ZFS: Loaded module v0.6.5.3-1~trusty, ZFS pool version 5000, ZFS filesystem version 5

Conclusion

You have now installed support for ZFS on Ubuntu 14.04. Next time we will cover setting up a ZFS pool to stick our data on.

References

• Ubuntu 12.04 - ZFS Getting Started