Up until today, I have been running Fedora 29 with the kernel 4.9. The current version of the kernel on Fedora 29 is 5.0. However, I had to stick with the 4.20 version for a very long while due to a thing I did a short while back. So what is that thing? Well, at one point ZFS (stable) no stopped working with the new kernel on Fedora 29. At then, I had a choice to either keep running older version of the kernel or trying out the new version of ZFS (testing). I opped for the second option. When Fedora 29 bumped its kernel to 5.0, unfortunately, the testing ZFS didn’t support this version of the kernel.
Today, I just found out that the ZFS testing branch has released a new version, 0.8.0-rc4. After the ZFS related packages have been upgraded, the first thing I did was trying to recompile the ZFS kernel module with the 5.0 kernel.
# dkms install zfs/0.8.0 -k 5.0.7-200.fc29.x86_64
The kernel module was successfully built and installed. To confirm that I rebooted the machine and switch to the latest kernel (5.0). Again, everything worked as expected. Thanks the OpenZFS team!
Since the ZFS is now working with kernel 5.0, and I have been having good experiences with Fedora 30 Beta running on a laptop, I thought it’s a good time to upgrade this desktop machine too.
Here’s the command I run to upgrade from Fedora 29 to 30:
# dnf system-upgrade download --refresh --releasever=30 \
--setopt='module_platform_id=platform:f30'
It took quite a long time to download all required packages, followed by a reboot for the upgrade to begin. After the second reboot, my desktop presented the login screen. For most people, this is it. The machine has been successfully upgraded to Fedora 30 Beta. However, in my case, I need to recompile the ZFS kernel module for this Fedora 30. Again, the command is pretty much the same as the above one:
# dkms install zfs/0.8.0 -k 5.0.7-300.fc30.x86_64
Once the kernel module build is finished, another reboot was required in order to let the ZFS kernel module loaded and the ZPOOL automatically imported.
I think the Fedora team is really awesome. A lot of work must have been put in for this smooth upgrade to happen.