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+---
+layout: post
+title: "Mount a Zvol under linux"
+date: 2024-01-12
+comments: true
+tags: zfs, zvol, mount, kpartx, linux, nixos
+---
+
+Zvol are volumes backed by a zfs pool. They are quite popular as vm disk images. 
+
+Sometimes you just want to examine them in the host; here is how to mount them.
+
+When the pool is imported, they show up under `/dev/zvol/<path to zvol
+dataset>`. At this point they are just raw drives, and kernel knows nothing
+about its structure. To be able to mount them, we first need to read its
+partition structure and create partition specific `/dev/` entires with
+`kpartx(8)`[^1].
+
+```shell
+# -a for add
+kpartx -a /dev/zvol/<pathtozvol>
+```
+
+This will create corresponding devices for partitions under `/dev/mapper`
+
+```
+$:/dev/mapper]# ls -al
+total 0
+drwxr-xr-x  2 root root     120 Jan 12 17:04 .
+drwxr-xr-x 20 root root    3980 Jan 12 17:04 ..
+crw-------  1 root root 10, 236 Jan 12 17:00 control
+lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root       7 Jan 12 17:04 root-zvol1 -> ../dm-0
+lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root       7 Jan 12 17:04 root-zvol2 -> ../dm-1
+lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root       7 Jan 12 17:04 root-zvol3 -> ../dm-2
+```
+
+Now you can mount them as a regular disk with `mount`.
+
+```
+mount /dev/mapper/root-zvol1 /mnt
+```
+
+[^1]: In nixos, `kpartx` is part of package [`multipath-tools`](https://search.nixos.org/packages?channel=23.11&show=multipath-tools&from=0&size=50&sort=relevance&type=packages&query=kpartx)