How to Install TrueNAS on a Raspberry Pi

Summary

Now that Joel0 in the TrueNAS community has created a fork of TrueNAS that runs on Arm, I thought I'd give it a spin—on a Raspberry Pi. I currently run an Ampere Arm server in my rack with Linux and ZFS as my primary storage server, and a Raspberry Pi with four SATA SSDs and ZFS as backup replica in my studio. My configuration for these Arm NASes is up on GitHub. I've been looking forward to TrueNAS support on Arm for years, though it seems the sentiment in that community was 'Arm servers aren't powerful enough to run serious storage servers'—despite myself and many others doing so for many years... but that's besides the point. On a Raspberry Pi? Yes, in fact. I've found numerous times, running modern applications on slower hardware is an excellent way to expose little configuration flaws and misconceptions that lead to learning how to run the applications much better on more capable machines. From my Pi Dramble to my Petabyte Pi Project, running apps intended for much more powerful hardware taught me a lot. So maybe running TrueNAS, which demands 8 GB of RAM and 16 GB of primary storage, would be a fun learning exercise. I've done it on x86 servers, but that's boring. It's easy. I don't learn much when a project goes off without a hitch, and I'm not forced to look closer at some of the configuration quirks. On a Raspberry Pi, there's no UEFI One glaring problem with the Raspberry Pi is no official support for UEFI, a standard way to boot computers and interface operating systems to device firmware. Raspberry Pi only officially supports device-tree-based Linux booting, which is much less standard. That means you can't just throw any old Linux distribution on the Pi, you have to have ones tailored to the Pi. There are good OSes for the Pi, like Raspberry Pi OS, based on Debian. But it's not the same as grabbing Windows on Arm and installing it on my Ampere workstation. To get past this restriction, we have to rely on a community project, forked from Windows on Raspb...