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ZFS on Linux v0.7.0 released
- chungy 9y agoBig fan of ZFS and while there was an appearance of a lull while ZoL was stuck in 0.6.x for so long, this is a very welcome update :) Warning to all that use ZFS to host the /boot file system, however: GRUB doesn't presently support all the features added to this release. Be careful about the features you enable!
- simcop2387 9y agoThis is why I still suggest keeping it on ext of some method and then just backing it up to zfs. Though now I'm wondering if you could put a raid1 on a zdev that matches the real disk and get benefits that way.....
- Koshkin 9y agoWith both Linux and FreeBSD being open source, I am curious what is it that prevents ZFS from being a first-class, stable component in Linux right now, just as it already is in FreeBSD.
- privong 9y agoMy understanding is that potential licensing incompatibilities is what has kept ZFS from being (tightly) integrated into linux: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS#Linux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS#Linux
- saghm 9y agoZFS's license (CDDL) is generally considered incompatible with Linux's (GPLv2), whereas it's compatible with the BSD license. See https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2016/feb/25/zfs-and-linux/ https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2016/feb/25/zfs-and-linux/, which also discusses the case of Ubuntu moving towards including it by default anyhow.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- willlll 9y agoMaybe it's fixed with this version, but we've seen kernel pauses on the order of minutes under high memory / OOM situations, with ZoL trying to get memory.
- dpedu 9y agoWhat was your setup like? I've encountered similar - the cause ended up being a mix of xattrs (I don't use them so I just disabled the feature) and needing to tune zfs to be less aggressive handling my consumer-grade disks.
- nasduia 9y agoCan you expand on what you did to tune things?
- barrkel 9y agoI run a 10 disk raidz2 array on a box with 4G RAM. If I'm running many other things on that box, memory gets very tight, and it swaps occasionally too. I've not seen kernel pauses on FS accesses though.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- nwmcsween 9y agoHas ZoL made a unified page cache yet? This is a major reason I won't use it.
- sargun 9y agoNo. You are still reliant on the Arc which is kept on a slab outside of Linux's traditional page cache.
- anorwell 9y agoEncryption didn't make it in? That's too bad!
- lathiat 9y agoYeah I've been watching the pull request eagerly but not quite there :( https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/pull/5769 https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/pull/5769 Judging by the comments from today though it sounds like it will be merged very shortly after this release. So that's good news :D I'm also wanting to look at this "OPAL" native drive encryption stuff, which requires among other things a UEFI plugin and some other bits. That would be a useful solution also though much more versatile here in ZFS for example doing per-user stuff, and also encrypted send without decrypting Lots of good changes in 0.7 otherwise!
- lmm 9y agoWait, has encryption hit open-source ZFS at all? Can I use it on FreeBSD?
- wspeirs 9y agoDon't know if you can use it on FreeBSD yet, but tcaputi added it to Linux here: https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/pull/5769 https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/pull/5769 Matt Ahrens approved the changes, and hopefully it'll get rolled in ZoL soon. Full disclosure, I work with Tom at Datto.
- wspeirs 9y agoYes, Brian's plan was to fold encryption into ZFS after 0.7.0. It was simply too large of a change to do in one shot.
- 43224gg252 9y agoFor as much propaganda as I see about ZFS, I've never once encountered it in the wild. Most of the companies here I've never even heard of and the ones I have heard of aren't companies I would take into account when choosing a file system. http://open-zfs.org/wiki/Companies http://open-zfs.org/wiki/Companies In all my years I've never encountered or needed this file system, and every time it's mentioned it sounds like it's more trouble to run it than its worth.
- a012 9y agoAre you talking about ZFS on linux or just ZFS itself? It's pretty wild to say "it's more trouble to run it than its worth" just about ZFS when you run it on FreeBSD or Solaris.
- walrus 9y agoMaybe you just happened to work in industries that don't need it? I've had 5 software development jobs, two of which used ZFS. At one of them, it was an integral part of their product: at the time their product was launched, there was no other filesystem that did what they needed. I did not seek out jobs related to ZFS.
- protomyth 9y agoIf I at a community college have adopted ZFS, with the low resources I have, I would hardly believe it’s more trouble than it’s worth. In fact, it has saved me time, money (no more expensive RAID card), and effort. I have more trouble with FreeBSD than ZFS, but even with those troubles ZFS hasn’t let me down.
- lmm 9y agoI use it because it's a lot less trouble than what I did before. Separate md, lvm and filesystem means 3 different sets of commands; now I don't worry about partitions, mount points or anything like that, I just run one big zfs and throw all my disks in there. It stores all my data, and there's a single command interface which I only use for replacing disks (with zero data loss).
- _joel 9y agoWell, I can speak from experience that a well known UK broadcaster uses it heavily as part of a video storage network system (specifically ZoL, but ZFS also used with Solaris too)
- thinkingkong 9y agoPart of the challenge with ZFS is its amazing and (almost) nobody uses it. It creates a weird chicken-and-egg scenario with regards to familiarity in production. If Google can get away without using it then why do you need to have it? The reality is: you don't. It's another incredible technical achievement that was amazing for its time, but the world of containers, speed of systems, and abstraction of physical machines have made it more or less a moot point for everyone other than SAN administrators or hardcore COW optimization junkies.
- symlinkk 9y agowhat do containers, speed, and abstraction have to do with maintaining the integrity of data? ZFS is the most popular filesystem for NAS's for a good reason...because it checksums data and can tell you (and correct from) failures.
- georgyo 9y agoZFS works work containers and works well with docker. ZFS is really really amazing, beyond the SAN. It's fantastic for both desktops and servers. The lack of adaption is problematic, but I use it for all sorts of things. Like mirroring snapshots between prod and qa, including the database and assets. I can test complicated software upgrades or database migrations quickly and repeatily. This is not something docker can't do by itself. Much of the stuff I do with ZFS I can now do with btrfs, but ZFS is just so much nicer to work with.
- williamstein 9y agoLast week, I created about 500,000 separate zfs pools to back the Docker containers we are running on cocalc. I love ZFS.
- linksnapzz 9y ago" If Google can get away without using it then why do you need to have it?" I think that comment has to go on the Best of 'Shit HN Says' corkboard ere long. I mean, when I am faced w/ a technical challenge at work, or at home...why would my first thought NOT be 'What would Google do in this situation?'
- vmp 9y agoI use ZoL for my home-server (5x3TB RAIDZ) and couldn't be happier, never had an issue too. The features really spoiled me compared to other filesystems/volume-managers. The only issue that irks me is that I can't resize a pool after it was created, can't add new disks, can't remove one (without risking parity). Recently I tried running a simple BTRFS SSD Mirror for only a single KVM virtual machine, I thought compression would be neat since they are just two cheap 120GB SSDs and I wanted to have a spare if one of them gave up the ghost. At first everything was great but after I ran a btrfs scrub, and it found ~4000 uncorrectable errors, my VM was broken beyond repair and had to be restored from backup. The SSDs SMART data was fine, there weren't any loose cables, everything worked great, no reported (ECC) memory errors... I have no proof but it seems that BTRFS just decided to destroy itself. I have since moved my SSDs to a ZoL mirror and (after running scrubs every two days for two weeks) had no further corruption, silent or otherwise. To me, this means that btrfs just isn't stable enough for production use - while ZoL is.
- gregmac 9y ago> The only issue that irks me is that I can't resize a pool after it was created, can't add new disks, can't remove one (without risking parity). This is what eliminates it from home use for me. It means to expand the pool the only way is to copy everything off (so you need enough spare storage to hold your entire pool), rebuild, then copy it back. The alternative is don't expand, and just add additional pools, but that starts losing benefits quickly (not having to think about where there's free space when adding something, not having to look in multiple locations to find something). Can anyone who has been using ZFS long-term at home comment? How do you add more space?
- gigatexal 9y agoWow, just wow. These perf improvements are great. ASIC accelerated filesystems is just crazy ### Performance * ARC Buffer Data (ABD) - Allocates ARC data buffers using scatter lists of pages instead of virtual memory. This approach minimizes fragmentation on the system allowing for a more efficient use of memory. The reduced demand for virtual memory also improves stability and performance on 32-bit architectures. * Compressed ARC - Cached file data is compressed by default in memory and uncompressed on demand. This allows for an larger effective cache which improves overall performance. * Vectorized RAIDZ - Hardware optimized RAIDZ which reduces CPU usage. Supported SIMD instructions: sse2, ssse3, avx2, avx512f, and avx512bw, neon, neonx2 * Vectorized checksums - Hardware optimized Fletcher-4 checksums which reduce CPU usage. Supported SIMD instructions: sse2, ssse3, avx2, avx512f, neon * GZIP compression offloading - Hardware optimized GZIP compression offloading with QAT accelerator. * Metadata performance - Overall improved metadata performance. Optimizations include a multi-threaded allocator, batched quota updates, improved prefetching, and streamlined call paths. * Faster RAIDZ resilver - When resilvering RAIDZ intelligently skips sections of the device which don't need to be rebuilt.
- gbrown_ 9y ago> ASIC accelerated filesystems is just crazy What?
- dijit 9y agoYou should read his comment, he's talking about all the ASICs involved in the underlying filesystem.
- lorenzhs 9y agolet me rephrase gbrown_'s question: which part of my CPU is specific to ZFS? Because that's what ASIC means. The acronym stands for Application-specific integrated circuit.
- anoother 9y agoI guess this refers specifically to the following bullets: * Vectorized RAIDZ - Hardware optimized RAIDZ which reduces CPU usage. Supported SIMD instructions: sse2, ssse3, avx2, avx512f, and avx512bw, neon, neonx2 * Vectorized checksums - Hardware optimized Fletcher-4 checksums which reduce CPU usage. Supported SIMD instructions: sse2, ssse3, avx2, avx512f, neon * GZIP compression offloading - Hardware optimized GZIP compression offloading with QAT accelerator. All use vector and/or SIMD instructions on the CPU, thoughh QuickAssist (QAT above) is available on dedicated add-in card also.
- nwrk 9y agoThank you and congrats on release - beer time (running release candidate on laptop via Arch without issues and current stable on many servers)
- XorNot 9y agoNice - zfs allow is now working. That's big news since it means users can snapshot.
- unixhero 9y agoWow. What a massive release.
- flyinghamster 9y agoIt's a crying shame that DKMS is so horribly broken on RHEL/CentOS/SL. Nothing like having it blithely make weak-updates symlinks to the ZFS and SPL modules that were compiled for your oldest still-installed kernel, only for those symlinks to end up pointing nowhere after that old kernel gets deleted. Oops! Your zpools now won't import until you clean up the mess. Been there, done that too many times.
- ewwhite 9y agoYeah, I have to play the game of deleting the zfs and spl packages, deleting weak-modules and reinstalling on the new kernel. It's expected, but silly.