I’ve started using a ZFS root filesystem on all of my computers now. Various wants on different systems have led to me using ZFS native encryption on some systems, and ZFS on LVM on LUKS on some others. I’ve had a chance to feel out both options, and I’ve learned a bunch in the meantime, so I decided to try something else now.

This post gets into a scheme that allows a single self contained zpool to offer LUKS key managent and unlocking options on NixOS.

I wrote a tab I’m pretty proud of. The song is 林泉吟/Melodies of forest and springs by Raflum | 雨鎖悲秋:

I recent transitoned to using boot.initrd.systemd.enable = true on NixOS. It wasn’t terrible to figure out, but I did have some migrations to figure out for my boot process customizations. This is the blog post I wish I had to read first regardless 😅.

For many system configurations, transitioning to a systemd based initrd process will just work with the one config line above. This post gets into config patterns that typically require migration, what my personal migration looked like, and advice for debugging boot processes for any migration.