Frequently Asked Questions

When is SystemRescue going to support ZFS

ZFS will not be included because of its licence. If it was just a technical matter it would already be included. The legal stuff is a gray area. Some people say it could be distributed, some other people say it cannot. Hence we are not going to take any legal risk.

However, we do provide a script that makes it easy to build a SystemRescueModule (SRM) containing the ZFS kernel module and tools. This can be loaded into a stock SystemRescue session after booting. The SRM can also be included directly in a custom-built SystemRescue ISO using the customization script.

Why is SystemRescue not able to automatically mount file systems

Most regular desktop distributions are able to automatically mount file systems, including from removable devices, in order to make the access to your data easy. but SystemRescue does not auto mount file systems in such a way, and there is a good reason for it. SystemRescue can be used to perform physical copies of disks or partitions at a block level using tools such as dd. It is essential that file systems on these devices are not mounted when this happens. If file systems were mounted automatically, these could cause these file systems to be accessed unintentionally while such operations are being performed, which is harmful. If data on a device are accessed by both the file system and by a tool such as dd, it is very likely to cause corruptions on the device, or on the copy of the device.

See the mountall script for a convenient alternative to auto mounting.

Is there a 32-Bit release of SystemRescue?

SystemRescue offered a 32-Bit / i686 architecture release that was based on Arch Linux 32 from versions 6.0.7 to 9.03. Because the vast majority of Linux distributions now only support the 64-Bit AMD/Intel architecture, the code for 32-Bit Intel architecture gets much less testing and development. This regularly lead to issues and continued support would have cost significant developement time. Also nearly all CPUs sold since 2006 support 64-Bit code. This is why SystemRescue decided to better invest the time in new features instead, see Issue #278 for details.

You can still download the old 32-Bit releases, see the “previous versions” section on the Download page.