OK. I am a little surprised because when I checked the grub git, I thought I saw the f2fs commit around 2 years ago.

I think that must have been the development branch, v2.04 was only released in July last year.

I don't think it would be sensible to use a bootloader from one of the development branches in the stable installer.

That said, it would not be hard to include a later version of grub with f2fs support into the Beowulf installer, would it?

Meanwhile I loop mounted the live Beowulf iso and looked in the live/initrd,img, but again no f2fs module. I had hoped that the refracta images might already support f2fs.

Again, I suppose that I ought to be able to build a new initrd.img with f2fs support and create an new iso with genisoimage, and maybe
an updated grub. But that is a bit of a hassle, especially as the laptop that I am expecting to buy is a rather new model with perhaps some chip and bios quirks to overcome.

Grub has supported f2fs for several years

Support for F2FS was added for version 2.04, which is only available in ceres.

I plan to install Beowulf on a new laptop soon, and wish to use f2fs as the root partition (and maybe boot partition) on the SSD.

Which, if any, of the install images support that? I looked at the  devuan_beowulf_3.0.0_RC_amd64_desktop-live.iso and there did not seem to be any f2fs packages in the on-disk pool.

I loop-mounted devuan_beowulf_3.0.0_RC_amd64_desktop-live.isoand ran lsinitramfs on the ../boot/iisolinux/initrd.gz which seems to be the initramsys for the installer, and looked around  lib/modules/4.19.0-8-amd64/kernel/fs/ for the f2fs module. It did not seem to be there.

That suggests that even if I prepartitioned an SSD and formatted for f2fs, even then the installer would fail?

Presumably all the installer iso's use a similar initramfs, so none of them would work?

Grub has supported f2fs for several years, but is that true of the grub in the installer, or is it somehow cut down?

Could the Beowulf installer please add support for f2fs?

Meanwhile, perhaps I could rebuild the initramfs from devuan_beowulf_3.0.0_RC_amd64_desktop-live.isoand adding f2fs, produce a new isa and use that. I am not sure what else I would need: presuambly if I used a net install I could fetch the other f2fs tools as needed?