Pick a recipe. Build a machine. Learn how it works.
kldload gives you one thing: a basic Linux platform with native ZFS. What you build on top of it is up to you.
The pages below are distilled from 70,000+ pages of personal notes — years of building real infrastructure, condensed into examples of what's possible. They are not copy-paste tutorials. They are not push-button solutions. They are a resource for people who want to understand the primitives and build their own thing.
Every recipe was actually built and tested. They work. But the point isn't to follow them step by step — it's to see what's possible when you start with a solid base, understand ISO 9660, and aren't afraid to read the scripts.
Hypervisor
KVM + QEMU + libvirt on ZFS. zvol-backed VMs with instant snapshots. Clone VMs in milliseconds. Your own private cloud on a single box.
Storage Server
NFS + iSCSI + Samba on ZFS. Serve files to your network with checksums, compression, and automatic snapshots. Self-healing if you mirror.
Media Server
Plex, Jellyfin, or Emby on ZFS. Your movies, music, and photos on a filesystem that never silently corrupts a frame. Up to 8.8TB and beyond.
VDI Desktop
Stream a full Linux desktop over the network. HLS, WebRTC, or SRT. GPU-accelerated encoding with NVIDIA. Access your desktop from any browser.
Cluster
Multi-node deployment with WireGuard mesh, Salt orchestration, and optional Kubernetes. Blow it away with a cron job. Rebuild in minutes. Hardware as a service.
Your idea here
Firewall appliance. DNS server. CI/CD runner. Container registry.
Backup server. Mail server. Game server. Whatever you want.
kldload is the foundation. postinstall.sh is your hook. Go build.
Appliance Recipes
Real-world appliances built on kldloadOS. Complete configs, package lists, systemd services, bill of materials. Full guides on GitHub.
More recipes
Deep dives from the field notes. Click any to read the full walkthrough.