I have tested ALEZ in the following configurations
- out of Antergos Live (18.11|18.12)
- out of ALEZ-arch[โฆ].iso, as given in README
โฆ on the following systems (all completely cleaned including zap of GPT and MBR and additionally overwriting first and last regions (as either setup by the installer or custom configured in forefront) with 0s after any failed attempt - deemed necessary, because ALEZ vomited and freezed on each take without):
a) HP EliteBook 2730p
a1 โ CPU Intelยฎ Core 2 Duo CPU L9400 โ RAM 4GiB (2*2) DDR-II โ iGPU Intel 4500 MHD
b) HP EliteBook 2740p
b1 โ CPU "Arrandale" Intel Core i5 520M vPro โ RAM 4GiB (22) DDR-III โ iGPU "Ironlake"
b2 โ CPU "Arrandale" Intel Core i5 540M vPro โ RAM 8GB (24) DDR-III โ iGPU "Ironlake"
c) HP EliteBook 2760p
c1 โ CPU "SandyBridge" Intel Core i7 2620M vPro โ RAM 16 GiB (2*8) DDR-III โ iGPU "HD 3000"
โ AMT (disabled)
โ BIOS | UEFI
โ HDD โ a1|b1|b2 โ INT ยตSATA GB 80 Intel SSD 320 1.8" | 160 GB Toshiba 1.8"
โ HDD INT SATA
โ HDD EXT USB 2 IDE 2.5" + 3,5" GB : 40|80|120
โ HDD EXT USB 3 with the following drives
โ EXT SATA (300|600) 2.5" + 3.5" GB : 40|80|160|320|1.5TB|2TB|3TB
โ EXT eSATA (via 2740p Docking Station + via PC-Card) same drives as listed before in EXT SATA
โ EXT FireWire 400 to SATA with the drives listed on EXT SATA
โ WLAN Intel a|b|g|n
โ WWAN a1 [Qualcomm Gobi 1000] โ b1|b2 [Qualcomm Gobi 2000] | c1 [Erricson 5521 HSPA+]
โ BT BroadCom
โ LAN GigaBit Intel
โ SmartCard
โ PC-Card 54
โ SDHC
WAN runs at ~ 3 MiB/s
โฆ after some diddly daddly unstructured probing via Antergos Live [18.11 | 18.12]:
I did 3 general configurations of the above abilities:
โ A โ just what is needed ( means WWAN | WLAN | FireWire | PC-Card | eSATA | etc โฆ disabled)
โ B โ everything (, asides AMT and TXT) enabled
โ C โ just what is needed but โ C1 eSATA via Dock | C2 eSATA via PC-Card
Any given combination of ALEZ options tested:
What (reproducibly) happened was:
I โ ALEZ crashed totally (including Freeze of the TTY) when booted via UEFI and selecting UEFI setup with GRUB on internal SATA HDD|SSD right at the moment it checks the existing partitioning, if it was not completely cleaned in forefront (as described above by total zap GPT+MBR and nullify ins and outs โ a.k.a.: Yeah to kill ZFS created by ZoL only works that way; even when sweeping by overwriting with a FreeBSD or OpenIndiana complete-disk setup the via ZFSonLinux created pools are somehow surviving as phantoms - absolutely no idea why and where they (exactly) hide (because that differs - could be specific to the EliteBooks, as they even with AMT | DriveLock | Intel Anti Theft | TXT | SecureBoot, etc. disabled sometimes, magically make a jump back in time as if none of the actions have been taken.
II โ ALEZ only starts downloading, in terms of actually preparing the install of the final system, if booted via BIOS, selecting either UEFI+GRUB with a maximum of 8063MiB for ESP|EF00 at sector 2048 or BIOS+GRUB (automatically 1 MiB at Sector 2048 to 4095 for EF02 bios_grub partition followed by max rest of HDD as hardcoded in ALEZ); Downloading at around 3MiB/s and installing the system takes between 30 to 45 minutes (which is a heck if i may say so); installation is always unbootable due to the fact that grub isn't effectively written, nothing there after reboot, as if grub was installed to an overlay of the real ESP|BIOS_GRUB).
All other variants (systemd instead of grub, either booted UEFI or BIOS, etc. makes no difference) fail, somewhere in between selecting auto-partition target| selecting prepared partition up to starting the download of the final system (breaks right at the beginning).
What all variants have had in common that though EXT-USB drives are shown and can be selected for auto-partitioning run up to the the point where in UEFI-setup choosing the partition (part2) for the system would have been or actually is asked (depending on the type of setup โ auto-partition vs. custom prepared.
ALEZ breaks immediately if there is any media containing a zpool present.
Where ALEZ actually runs the whole install, the moment mkcpio (i hope i remember this right) processes whatever it does, ALEZ either breaks or if passing that point, mumbles about can not this can not that blabliblu โฆ yep.
At some point (while trying to follow the output) i recognized that ALEZ attempted to check for a fsck.zfs and wonders wtf is going on; whereas i wonder, does such a tool exist?
ALEZ hicks up on downloading the system if used with a 5 GHz Ch. 36 WLAN 802.11n WPA2-PSK; also if used with a or b or through a second router on LAN, which seems related as in these cases the rate isn't handled at the rates that are possible (11|22|100 mbit), but that is most likely due to default settings of the network management.
โ
If you got to this point, you might wonder why the f i am blubbering all that out?
Answer is: I did these tests over about 10 days, asides my work, so to say as an alternative to completely shutdown my brain whenever my focus got lost. Please keep that in mind.
I named the things that i noted while in that pause-state-off-of-the-real-work and bundled it to the conclusions that jumped into my dried-out eyeballs, so stark it might give you an idea of where to enable some try-and-catch-style-figurines in your concept.
If you like to inspect further, i am willed to test specific constellations, with feedback, log files whatever you need. Just create complete case-description, deliver the patched versions with clear instructions or even totally automated. For that i can for about two to three weeks one of the 2740p and the 2760p set on layback for experiments, but in a reduced setup without flipping all possible switches (which i did only because the disks i used have been marked for deletion, so any real-data overwrite was welcome). I am fine with internal HDD|SSD SATA 80|160|320 or EXTUSB SATA 40|80; which should be enough to run some specific variations, right?
By the way, all those systems work perfectly fine, with Antergos ZFS install, customized after installation for use with zedenv and/or beadm; also with Debian Jessie|Stretch || Ubuntu Xenial|Bionic|Cosmic || Manjaro || CentOS || Fedora; Older versions need some to a lot of tweaking (Python, pyenv, specific apt, etc.) but all worked in the end, with BIOS GPT and UEFI GPT as also both together as wholedisk-installs or on custom partitions, also those prepared with OpenIndiana and FreeBSD 11.1 and 11.2; What came to mind is that since ZoL included userobj_accounting feature-flag it has to be explicitly disabled on creation in e.g.: ubuntu cosmic and accompanied by posix-acl, else none of the systems worked with neither zedenv nor beadm; Maybe that's a point to consider?
And yes, you might have come to the conclusion that i am fine with all-things-debian, but clearly arch is to me like a shudder, somehow, don't even know why.
However, hope it helps transcending your minds so you feel the need to nail yourself on crossed woodstabs and smile eloquently or let your body drift through waves of snow finding yourself on a cuddly piece of flat earth in the northern hemisphere.
Hope it helps, somehow!