The freedom to build whatever you want, for free.

The origin

The OpenZFS community identified a gap: getting ZFS on root across multiple Linux distributions was too hard. Too much manual partitioning, DKMS debugging, initramfs hacking. I built a re-packer to fix it. That was the beginning.

What BSD had all along

ZFS comes from enterprise Unix — the world of IBM AIX and Sun Solaris, where banks, airlines, governments, and defense agencies trust their infrastructure to the filesystem because they can't afford not to. Copy-on-write. End-to-end checksums. Atomic snapshots. Self-healing. Integrated volume management. These weren't features added later — they were the design from day one. FreeBSD has had this natively for years, along with verified boot chains and proper networking baked into the kernel.

Linux didn't. It does now.

About me

I'm a System Operator. Give me a kernel and I'll build whatever you need. I think in primitives — what the kernel provides, what the filesystem guarantees, what the network stack can do natively. I build tools for the job and don't have much use for userland — I'm just lazy and ask the kernel.

I read the OpenZFS install documentation. It said "install from package." Add a third-party repo. Hope DKMS compiles against your kernel. Manually configure the initramfs. Debug when it doesn't boot. Nope. That ain't gonna happen. So I built a re-packer that bakes it all in at build time. It's not rocket science — it just works from first boot. These modules are the minimums that everyone should have — and now so do you.

— Anthony

Need more?