On OpenBSD, /etc/daily and /etc/weekly quietly watch over the machine and mail you a report. On FreeBSD, periodic(8) does the same. I love that model, but when I wanted ZFS on my laptop, Void Linux turned out to have better drivers than FreeBSD for my hardware. The catch is that Void ships no periodic maintenance at all. So I wrote two small POSIX shell scripts, one daily and one weekly, that mimic the BSD reports and add checks specific to ZFS and to a laptop. They log everything, compare today with yesterday, and interrupt me only for real problems such as a degraded pool, a failing disk, or a kernel installed without its ZFS module. This post walks through each check, the command behind it, and why it is there.

I can put both at the top of void-zfs-maintenance-blog.md if you want. I can also write a shorter, punchier title, for example "Daily and weekly maintenance on Void Linux with ZFS, the BSD way", which matches the current heading of the post.

If you run FreeBSD on ZFS, you probably can't imagine upgrading without bectl anymore. Take a boot environment, run freebsd-update or pkg upgrade, and if something goes wrong, reboot into the previous state. No backup to restore, no rescue USB stick.

This whole thing started because of Stefano and his blog. His guide to installing Void Linux on an encrypted ZFS root with hibernation support was the thing that got me curious enough to actually try it — and, as these things go, curiosity turned into an afternoon spent repartitioning a laptop I use every day. My setup below is simpler than his (no LUKS-encrypted swap, no hibernation), because I just wanted ZFS-on-root dual-booted alongside my existing FreeBSD/GhostBSD/OpenBSD rEFInd menu, but the bones of the approach — and the credit for pointing me at zfsbootmenu in the first place — are his.