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(I think you meant "FreeBSD isn't the ...")? ZFS was shipped on FreeBSD in 7.0 -- about a decade ago. That's 10 years of development, testing, QA, and use in p

(I think you meant "FreeBSD isn't the ...")? ZFS was shipped on FreeBSD in 7.0 -- about a decade ago. That's 10 years of development, testing, QA, and use in production. Canonical just recently began providing kernel modules for ZFS. It appears as if Red Hat may never include support for ZFS and -- unless some changes happen WRT licensing -- it will almost certainly never be part of the Linux kernel. I've had "ZFS on root" setups on my laptops and workstations on Ubuntu (previously) and Arch Linux (currently) and have several servers using ZFS on FreeBSD. Initial installation and setup of ZFS is a major pain in the ass on Linux, compared to FreeBSD -- especially when dealing with anything more complicated than a single ZFS pool on a single disk.

michaelmrose 9y ago
I don't care how you capitalize it. On funtoo/gentoo/arch basically any distro where the installation is manual zfs is exceptionally simple to set up. This stage took me about 30 seconds to figure out having never used zfs. On any rolling release you could easily be using the same setup for the next decade or more simply duplicating an existing setup to a new machine periodically. A small amount of work up front seems like a good trade for never having to do so again.
- jlgaddis 9y ago
  I tend to make use of lots of datasets on my machines, including in and under /var (e.g., /var, /var/backups, /var/cache, /var/log, /var/mail, /var/spool, /var/tmp, and probably a few others I'm forgetting) and some hosts have multiple pools as well. I never had any issues with this on FreeBSD. Linux, however, was another story. Installation would go smoothly and without incident but I'd run into issues immediately upon first boot. I spent many hours trying to figure out what/where the problem was and it turned out to be race conditions with systemd and filesystems/partitions being mounted. (At the time, I had a few years experience with ZFS and had installed who-knows-how-many servers using ZFS exclusively, yet I had never had any issues with this. Of course, none of those servers were infected by systemd either.) Now that I'm aware of the issues I can work around them. If you just want a single pool on a single disk and a minimal number of datasets, you'll probably be fine -- you're right, that's a cinch to set up. Like I said, however, don't be surprised if you have problems when trying to do anything more complicated than that.
  - michaelmrose 9y ago
    So once again systemd is a pos shocking. I think the solution is to mount via /etc/fstab or don't use systemd.

michaelmrose 9y ago

I don't care how you capitalize it. On funtoo/gentoo/arch basically any distro where the installation is manual zfs is exceptionally simple to set up. This stage took me about 30 seconds to figure out having never used zfs. On any rolling release you could easily be using the same setup for the next decade or more simply duplicating an existing setup to a new machine periodically. A small amount of work up front seems like a good trade for never having to do so again.

jlgaddis 9y ago
I tend to make use of lots of datasets on my machines, including in and under /var (e.g., /var, /var/backups, /var/cache, /var/log, /var/mail, /var/spool, /var/tmp, and probably a few others I'm forgetting) and some hosts have multiple pools as well. I never had any issues with this on FreeBSD. Linux, however, was another story. Installation would go smoothly and without incident but I'd run into issues immediately upon first boot. I spent many hours trying to figure out what/where the problem was and it turned out to be race conditions with systemd and filesystems/partitions being mounted. (At the time, I had a few years experience with ZFS and had installed who-knows-how-many servers using ZFS exclusively, yet I had never had any issues with this. Of course, none of those servers were infected by systemd either.) Now that I'm aware of the issues I can work around them. If you just want a single pool on a single disk and a minimal number of datasets, you'll probably be fine -- you're right, that's a cinch to set up. Like I said, however, don't be surprised if you have problems when trying to do anything more complicated than that.
- michaelmrose 9y ago
  So once again systemd is a pos shocking. I think the solution is to mount via /etc/fstab or don't use systemd.