I have Mint 19 installed on a fairly old machine, where the performance isnt great. I was able to move the swap partition to a ZFS pool with these instructions. However, I want to move the /tmp and /var/temp to the ZFS pool for increased disk speed, as well. However, I cant seem to find decent instructions on how to do that. How should I go about moving those two folders into a ZFS pool?

1 Answer

Replace rpool with your ZFS pool name in the instructions below.

Move /tmp to ZFS

1. Move your existing /tmp directory somewhere else:

   mv /tmp /tmp2

2. Create a ZFS file system for /tmp. Note that the mountpoint property should be legacy due to an outstanding race condition bug mentioned in the ZFS on Linux wiki ^{[Archive, step 4.11]}.

   zfs create -o mountpoint=legacy rpool/tmp

3. Copy the contents of your old /tmp folder to the new one:

   rsync -avHXShPs /tmp2/ /tmp/

4. Verify that the contents copied over correctly before deleting the old /tmp folder:

   rm -rfv /tmp2

5. Add the new /tmp folder to /etc/fstab so that it is mounted on boot:

   echo "rpool/tmp /tmp zfs defaults 0 0" | tee -a /etc/fstab

Move /var/tmp to ZFS

Basically the same instructions apply.

1. mv /var/tmp /var/tmp2

2. zfs create -o mountpoint=none rpool/var
   zfs create -o mountpoint=legacy rpool/var/tmp

3. rsync -avHXShPs /var/tmp2/ /var/tmp/

4. rm -rfv /var/tmp2

5. echo "rpool/var/tmp /var/tmp zfs defaults 0 0" | tee -a /etc/fstab