Hello all, I want to try using EasyOS installed on an SSD with an F2FS filesystem instead of ext4.
I've played around with lots of different distro's and have got f2fs to work with many of them
and basically it's an enormous improvement over ext4 in terms of performance, and is made to be
used with flash drives(SSD) as opposed to older HDD ,but requires
some unique considerations in order to work appropriately.
The easy way to get it working with other distributions is to find a distro with a calamares installer,
and to boot the live system in bios mode, not uefi mode, which alters how the bootloader is installed
at the end of the install process. Basically you end up making an unformatted 8MB partition with
the bios/grub flag, and the rest of the partitions you would expect for a typical install, i,e.
a separate /boot /boot/efi and / partition, and calamares does the rest and everything works neatly.
As far as I understand it, the basic requirements are that the bootloader, and the kernel both have F2FS
support, and /etc/fstab requires partitions to have UUID's instead of device names, the latter of which
I find to be done by default in recent distributions.
I did a google search and saw some forum post saying that the kernel in puppy 5.4 or something
had f2fs support, and looking at the github website for limine it says it does not have f2fs support
for philosophical reasons, i.e. to keep it smaller than grub, so that means I will have to use grub instead
of limine basically, and I believe the kernel in Easy already has f2fs support built in, so it should be
seamless if I can figure out how to alter the bootloader painlessly.
Anyways I thought I would post my thinking, and see if anyone had any helpful ideas
I'm not exactly sure about all the technical details because the way I have figured out
to get it working on all the other distributions is basically an Easymode hack, but I will try
and see today at some point if I can figure out how to properly install it.
