Installing Debian on F2FS Rootfs With Deboostrap and Systemd-Boot

I recently got a new NVME drive. My plan was to create a fresh Debian install on an F2FS root partition with compression for maximum performance. As it turns out, this is not entirely trivil to accomplish. For one, the Debian installer does not support F2FS (here is my attempt to add it from 2021). And even if it did, grub does not support F2FS with the extra_attr flag that is required for compression support (at least as of grub 2.06).

Luckily, we can install Debian anyway with all these these shiny new features when we go the manual road with debootstrap and using systemd-boot as bootloader. We can break down the process into several steps:

  1. Creating the partition table
  2. Creating and mounting the root partition
  3. Bootstrapping with debootstrap
  4. Chrooting into the system
  5. Configure the base system
  6. Define static file system information
  7. Installing the kernel and bootloader
  8. Finishing touches

Warning: Playing around with partitions can easily result in data if you mess up! Make sure to double check your commands and create a data backup if you don’t feel confident about the process.

Creating the partition partble

The first step is to create the GPT partition table on the new drive. There are several tools to do this, I recommend the ArchWiki page on this topic for details. For simplicity I just went with the GParted since it has an easy GUI, but feel free to use any other tool. The layout should look like this:

Type       │ Partition      │ Suggested size
───────────┼────────────────┼───────────────
EFI        │ /dev/nvme0n1p1 │         512MiB
Linux swap │ /dev/nvme0n1p2 │           1GiB
Linux fs   │ /dev/nvme0n1p3 │      remainder

Notes:

  • The disk names are just an example and have to be adjusted for your system.
  • Don’t set disk labels, they don’t appear on the new install anyway and some UEFIs might not like it on your boot partition.
  • The size of the EFI partition can be smaller, in practive it’s unlikely that you need more than 300 MiB. However some UEFIs might be buggy and if you ever want to install an additional kernel or something like memtest86+ you will be happy to have the extra space.
  • The swap partition can be omitted, it is not strictly needed. If you need more swap for some reason you can also add more using a swap file later (see ArchWiki page). If you know you want to use suspend-to-RAM, you want to increase the size to something more than the size of your memory.
  • If you used GParted, create the EFI partition as FAT32 and set the esp flag. For the root partition use ext4 or F2FS if available.

Creating and mounting the root partition

To create the root partition, we need to install the f2fs-tools first:

sudo apt install f2fs-tools

Now we can create the file system with the correct flags:

mkfs.f2fs -O extra_attr,inode_checksum,sb_checksum,compression,encrypt /dev/nvme0n1p3

For details on the flags visit the ArchWiki page.

Next, we need to mount the partition with the correct flags. First, create a working directory:

mkdir bootstrap
cd bootstrap
mkdir root
export DFS=$(pwd)/root

Then we can mount the partition:

sudo mount -o compress_algorithm=zstd:6,compress_chksum,gc_merge,lazytime /dev/nvme0n1p3 $DFS

Again, for details on the mount options visit the above mentioned ArchWiki page.

Bootstrapping with debootstrap

First we need to install the debootstrap package:

sudo apt install debootstrap

Now we can do the bootstrapping:

debootstrap --arch=amd64 --components=main,contrib,non-free,non-free-firmware unstable $DFS http://deb.debian.org/debian

Notes:

  • --arch sets the CPU architecture (see Debian Wiki).
  • --components sets the archive components, if you don’t want non-free pacakges you might want to remove some entries here.
  • unstable is the Debian release, you might want to change that to testing or bookworm.
  • $DFS points to the mounting point of the root partition.
  • http://deb.debian.org/debian is the Debian mirror, you might want to set that to http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian or similar if you have a fast mirror in you area.

Chrooting into the system

Before we can chroot into the newly created system, we need to prepare and mount virtual kernel file systems. First create the directories:

sudo mkdir -p $DFS/dev $DFS/dev/pts $DFS/proc $DFS/sys $DFS/run $DFS/sys/firmware/efi/efivars $DFS/boot/efi

Then bind-mount the directories from your system to the mount point of the new system:

sudo mount -v -B /dev $DFS/dev
sudo mount -v -B /dev/pts $DFS/dev/pts
sudo mount -v -B /proc $DFS/proc
sudo mount -v -B /sys $DFS/sys
sudo mount -v -B /run $DFS/run
sudo mount -v -B /sys/firmware/efi/efivars $DFS/sys/firmware/efi/efivars

As a last step, we need to mount the EFI partition:

sudo mount -v /dev/nvme0n1p1 $DFS/boot/efi

Now we can chroot into new system:

sudo chroot $DFS /bin/bash

Configure the base system

The first step in the chroot is setting the locales. We need this since we might leak the locales from our base system into the chroot and if this happens we get a lot of annoying warnings.

export LC_ALL=C.UTF-8 LANG=C.UTF-8
apt install locales console-setup

Set your locales:

dpkg-reconfigure locales

Set your keyboard layout:

dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration

Set your timezone:

dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

Now you have a fully functional Debian chroot! However, it is not bootable yet, so let’s fix that.

Define static file system information

The first step is to make sure the system mounts all partitions on startup with the correct mount flags. This is done in /etc/fstab (see ArchWiki page). Open the file and change its content to:

# file system                               mount point   type   options                                                       dump   pass

# NVME efi partition
UUID=XXXX-XXXX                              /boot/efi     vfat   umask=0077                                                    0      0

# NVME swap
UUID=XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX   none          swap   sw                                                            0      0

# NVME main partition
UUID=XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX   /             f2fs   compress_algorithm=zstd:6,compress_chksum,gc_merge,lazytime   0      1

You need to fill in the UUIDs for the partitions. You can use

ls -lAph /dev/disk/by-uuid/

to match the UUIDs to the more readable disk name under /dev.

Installing the kernel and bootloader

First install the systemd-boot and efibootmgr packages:

apt install systemd-boot efibootmgr

Now we can install the bootloader:

bootctl install --path=/boot/efi

You can verify the procedure worked with

efibootmgr -v

The next step is to install the kernel, you can find a fitting image with:

apt search linux-image-*

In my case:

apt install linux-image-amd64

After the installation of the kernel, apt will add an entry for systemd-boot automatically. Neat!

However, since we are in a chroot the current settings are not bootable. The first reason is the boot partition, which will likely be the one from your current system. To change that, navigate to /boot/efi/loader/entries, it should contain one config file. When you open this file, it should look something like this:

title      Debian GNU/Linux bookworm/sid
version    6.1.0-3-amd64
machine-id 2967cafb6420ce7a2b99030163e2ee6a
sort-key   debian
options    root=PARTUUID=f81d4fae-7dec-11d0-a765-00a0c91e6bf6 ro systemd.machine_id=2967cafb6420ce7a2b99030163e2ee6a
linux      /2967cafb6420ce7a2b99030163e2ee6a/6.1.0-3-amd64/linux
initrd     /2967cafb6420ce7a2b99030163e2ee6a/6.1.0-3-amd64/initrd.img-6.1.0-3-amd64

The PARTUUID needs to point to the partition equivalent to /dev/nvme0n1p3 on your system. You can use

ls -lAph /dev/disk/by-partuuid/

to match the PARTUUIDs to the more readable disk name under /dev.

The second problem is the ro flag in options which tell the kernel to boot in read-only mode. The default is rw, so you can just remove the ro flag.

Once this is fixed, the new system should be bootable. You can change the boot order with:

efibootmgr --bootorder

However, before we reboot we might add well add a user and install some basic software.

Finishing touches

Add a user:

useradd -m -G sudo -s /usr/bin/bash -c 'Full Name' username

Debian provides a TUI to install Desktop Environment. To open it, run:

tasksel

Now you can finally reboot into your new system:

reboot

Resources for further reading

https://ivanb.neocities.org/blogs/y2022/debootstrap
https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/apds03.en.html
https://www.addictivetips.com/ubuntu-linux-tips/set-up-systemd-boot-on-arch-linux/
https://p5r.uk/blog/2020/using-systemd-boot-on-debian-bullseye.html
https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/stable/chapter07/kernfs.html
Thanks for reading!

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