So Ubuntu 16.04 LTS is finally out. Is it the LTS that I’ve been waiting for? Ubuntu 15.10 was a fine operating system, but it promised out-of-the-box ZFS support, and didn’t really deliver on it. In the end I had to mess around with systemd to get everything working and that was a bit of a pain.

You see, years ago I switched over to ZFS after one of my drives decided to give up the ghost. Although I’ve been very happy with ZFS since then, it’s always been kind of a hassle to get things working again when I update my OS… that is, until now. How hard is it to mount my ZFS pool in Ubuntu 16.04?

$ sudo apt-get install zfsutils-linux
$ sudo zfs mount -vO -a

The -vO switch executes an overlay mount, which I need since I’m mounting my ZFS /home over the existing /home directory on my SSD. After everything is installed I can:

$ sudo zfs mount
tank                            /tank
tank/home                       /home

to make sure that the ZFS filesystem was mounted correctly.

To continue to mount the ZFS filesystem upon reboot we need to open up /etc/rc.local and add the following line to the file:

zfs mount -vO -a

That’s it? That’s it. Log out, log back in and we’re off to the races!