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#2217·umbrel

Storage Manager unavailable on Raspberry Pi hardware with multiple internal slots

Author: techwithanirudhCreated Sep 5, 2026Updated Sep 5, 2026

Problem

Storage Manager cannot be used on Raspberry Pi, including on Pi hardware that does have more than one internal NVMe slot (dual NVMe HATs, CM5 carrier boards). The limitation is usually described as Pi lacking drive slots, but that is not the actual blocker on multi slot boards.

The real cause is that the Pi image ships without ZFS. umbrelos-base-pi in packages/os/umbrelos.Dockerfile never installs it, while umbrelos-base (amd64 and generic arm64) does:

dockerfile
# umbrelos-base
RUN apt-get install --yes \
    zfs-dkms \
    zfsutils-linux \
    linux-headers-${TARGETARCH} \
    ...

hardware:raid still starts on Pi and expects ZFS to be there, so it errors on every boot.

Error

umbrelOS 2.0 Beta 1 on a Pi 5:

[hardware:raid           ] Starting RAID
[hardware:raid           ] [error] Failed to set ZFS ARC min
[Error: ENOENT: no such file or directory, open '/sys/module/zfs/parameters/zfs_arc_min'] {
  path: '/sys/module/zfs/parameters/zfs_arc_min'
[hardware:raid           ] [error] Failed to set ZFS l2arc_exclude_special
[Error: ENOENT: no such file or directory, open '/sys/module/zfs/parameters/l2arc_exclude_special'] {
  path: '/sys/module/zfs/parameters/l2arc_exclude_special'
$ which zpool zfs
(nothing)
$ ls /sys/module/zfs
ls: cannot access '/sys/module/zfs': No such file or directory

Verified fix on hardware

The Raspberry Pi archive that setup-raspberrypi.sh already configures ships a compatible OpenZFS build, so no new apt source is needed. Installing it manually on a Pi 5 running 6.18.39+rpt-rpi-2712:

zfs-dkms       2.4.1-1~bpo13+1~rpt1   (archive.raspberrypi.com trixie/main)
zfsutils-linux 2.4.1-1~bpo13+1~rpt1

DKMS builds cleanly against both kernel flavours:

Building initial module zfs/2.4.1 for 6.18.39+rpt-rpi-2712 ... done
Installing /lib/modules/6.18.39+rpt-rpi-2712/updates/dkms/zfs.ko.xz
Building initial module zfs/2.4.1 for 6.18.39+rpt-rpi-v8 ... done
Installing /lib/modules/6.18.39+rpt-rpi-v8/updates/dkms/zfs.ko.xz
$ zpool version
zfs-2.4.1-1~bpo13+1~rpt1
zfs-kmod-2.4.1-1~bpo13+1~rpt1

The boot errors above stop once the module is present.

PR

Opened #2216 with the fix.

Source: getumbrel/umbrel

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