F2FS Trisquel 11.
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Hello,
I have been trying for the past hours to install Trisquel 11 on a F2FS partition.
Seeing that one can't select F2FS in the installer I thought of using gparted after installing the f2fs-tools library but even tho all is properly done the UI doesn't allow to select it as a root.
Can someone help me with this?
I haven't been able to find documentation to solve this issue.
There's a good reason why most GNU/Linux distributions do not ship with F2FS support out of the box nor Calamares allows to install a system on top of it.
This filesystem is half-baked and has serious portability issues (despite the fact it's supposed to be portable), trying to mount a filesystem created with an newer kernel in an older one will catastrophically destroy data, this is a known and well documented issue.
Source (read the red warning at the head of the article): https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/F2FS
There's a mail list(s) discussing these problems somewhere, but I can't find it right now. My advice is that if you want to install a system on a flash drive or SD card you pick ext2 or ext4 with journaling disabled, in my experience ext performs much better on top of being reliable, do make tarball backups every now and then just in case.
--This filesystem is half-baked and has serious portability issues--
I've been testing it for several months on almost dead nand usb storage and it's really surprisingly how much it can squeeze more life from them while other filesystem were unbearably slow.
So I wanted to test on a nand ssd/nvme and see how it goes.
--trying to mount a filesystem created with an newer kernel in an older one will catastrophically destroy data--
I had sorta guessed this could have created issues after using it's fsck abilities on a usb key and it upgraded it to a newer version after I had migrated to a newer linux-libre kernel.
--in my experience ext performs much better on top of being reliable--
Ext4 is my go to too, but in the case of nand storage my knowledge on the subject has increased to the point that I know that any non dedicated filesystems for nand storage are actually killing them fast.
See "Why NAND Flash Breaks Down-VajB8vCsZ3s". I will point out that in the presentation that most of the mitigation of all those quantum effects are theoretically done by the controller, but you can't truly know because proprietary garbage.
In the end F2FS or other nand dedicated FS with one big only partition (I also don't like this) is so far the best solution for longevity and avoiding data corruption imo.
If you find that I'm too "extreme" on my view it's because I'm a magnet to defective nand storage.
Edit: thank you for your help. If I'm able to find a solution I'll make some documentation about it.
Ext4 is my go to too, but in the case of nand storage my knowledge on the subject has increased to the point that I know that any non dedicated filesystems for nand storage are actually killing them fast.
My understanding is that a weekly TRIM on classical filesystems (such as ext4) essentially solves the issue and that is why distributions do not adopt Flash-tailored filesystems by default, despite SSD now being more common than HDD on new computers. In the case of Trisquel, we have that timer enabled:
$ systemctl status fstrim.timer
● fstrim.timer - Discard unused blocks once a week
Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/fstrim.timer; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
Active: active (waiting) since Fri 2025-12-12 17:36:25 -03; 2 days ago
Trigger: Mon 2025-12-15 00:22:55 -03; 1h 16min left
Triggers: ● fstrim.service
Docs: man:fstrim
--systemctl status fstrim.timer--
Thank you for this systemct command I wasn't aware of, I used/use hdparm for that.
Triming is a good function as it solve one of the many scenarios of nand gate failures. The thing is as noted in the lecture, even reading can cause a gate or page to fail, f2fs and the other fs dedicated for flash do mitigate those issues unlike classic (yet robust) filesystem. That's why I want to test it for something else than just external usb storage.
--vendor preset: enabled)--
Good example on how some of these function are directly included in the controller of the storage.
--despite SSD now being more common than HDD on new computers--
Not having a 2.5inch slot doesn't help on newer hardware :(
Fine, since you've been warned and you're dealing with broken hardware anyway I might just share my two-cents about how I would do this.
I'd create the partition table with some tool such as fdisk, then format with f2fs whichever partitions you want using that filesystem, and then during install you pick the manual partitioning, select the partitions, assign mountpoints, etc, but tell the installer to not format them.
I have no clue whether the initramfs will ship with f2fs mount support, in theory it should, I would need to test all of this on a VM to confirm whether this is possible with Trisquel given Calamares makes a lot of assumptions about how the system's installed, there's little room for hacking.
--since you've been warned and you're dealing with broken hardware anyway--
This is not for production. The best way to test this long time imo would be to make it a optional redundancy machine and see over time how it behaves.
--I'd create the partition table with some tool such as fdisk, then format with f2fs whichever partitions you want using that filesystem, and then during install you pick the manual partitioning, select the partitions, assign mountpoints, etc, but tell the installer to not format them. --
I have tried that before without success, the Trisquel GUI installer just refuse to be able to define the F2FS partition as root.
--I would need to test all of this on a VM to confirm--
So far I have been trying on hardware. I haven't tried since my last post but it's still planned
Again thank you sally :)