17 ms·

Glad to see ZFS adoption increasing. It is such a great filesystem and is one of the main reasons my home servers run FreeBSD.

TheAceOfHearts 8y ago
You can also use ZFS on Debian. I use it for my home server and I haven't had any issues. Although I'll note that I don't use ZFS on my boot device, just on storage HDDs. Booting from ZFS seemed like a hassle, without clear benefits.
- Mister_Snuggles 8y ago
  > Booting from ZFS seemed like a hassle, without clear benefits. On FreeBSD, ZFS is a first-class citizen. Root-on-ZFS is something that the installer can do and the bootloader understands. I've used root-on-ZFS through five FreeBSD versions (plus numerous minor versions), all upgraded using freebsd-update, with no issues. On Linux, ZFS seems to be an addon, so hassles are to be expected. As for benefits, Boot Environments[0][1] are a great reason for having root-on-ZFS. While I don't personally do this, I can definitely see the appeal of being able to roll back a major OS upgrade. [0] https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?beadm https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?beadm [1] https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/howto-freebsd-zfs-madness.31662/ https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/howto-freebsd-zfs-madness...
- johannes1234321 8y ago
  > Booting from ZFS seemed like a hassle, without clear benefits. On Solaris it is integrated with the package manager, thus on updates a snapshot is taken and if anything goes wrong one can revert to the previous state.
- jeduardo 8y ago
  > Booting from ZFS seemed like a hassle, without clear benefits. It used to be a major hassle around 2 years ago but since then things have evolved significantly, up to the point where as long as you follow the install instructions correctly the first time, you can trust it to just keep on working. One benefit (for me) is the ability of having full system snapshots taken periodically with minimum storage cost. I've used a setup on my personal workstation for years where a zfSnap job takes snapshots every hour. This has proven itself to be super convenient when accidents occur. Of course that the important data is backed up externally or committed to Git, but having the possibility to quickly revert mistakes is a big nice to have. Such a system could also be easily improved to ship these snapshots to an offsite location as incremental backups. Of course the same process can be done in many other ways, but it is also other thing nice to have. Another benefit I've had with this is portability between machines. My current Debian Stable system with ZFS on root began its life running out of an external HDD plugged onto an old Macbook Air. After I was able to get an external SSD and a Thunderbolt adapter, all I needed to do was to add the new device to the existing pool as a mirror and wait for resilvering, then remove the old device after all data was mirrored and the migration was done. When I finally got a new laptop, all I needed to do was to boot from the SSD and add the new NVMe device to the pool as a mirror, then remove the old SSD afterwards. There is also the transparent compression feature that can potentially save a lot of HDD space depending on the usage pattern of the particular system. And of course since ZFS is there present in your system (as it's the rootfs anyway!) you can use all other features you want, such as slicing volumes to use as root volumes for virtual machines or to use it as the backend for a local Docker host, where Docker can use an specific ZFS driver and leverage filesystem capabilities when storing images. Of course you don't need to run it as the rootfs for many of these things, but you if do like ZFS then the benefits, possibilities, and the fact that you can do it outweigh the (nowadays reduced) hassle. :)
- hultner 8y ago
  I’ve been using it on Debian for a about 3 years (and on FreeBSD almost 10 years), wouldn’t say that it has been without its problems on Debian but it seems mostly stable for home use. Had some problems in Debian 8/Jessie especially when upgrading to 9, used it professional on some hardware testing rigs a few years back but it was a bit more cumbersome then I had hoped (had to resort to FreeBSD live boot at one point to access our data. Haven’t had any problems in about a year now but only use it on one of my home servers running Debian. On FreeBSD it’s always been fantastic, same for illumos.
- HankB99 8y ago
  > Booting from ZFS seemed like a hassle, without clear benefits. I'm running ZFS on a single boot/user partition on an XPS 13 (9370.) I was unable to get the built in WiFi working with Debian Stretch but it seems to work well enough with testing (Buster.) I have apt-buglist and apt-listchanges (or similar) installed to warn me of possible problems, but I feel more comfortable thinking that I can roll back a system that becomes borked by a buggy upgrade. (Haven't had to do it yet.) Ordinarily I'd have a separate $HOME partition but I'm settling on a $HOME filesystem (which is covered by `rsync` backups.) It was a bit of a hassle but not IMO w/out benefits for my use case. I have other servers running Debian Stretch and Ubuntu 16.04 that are using ZFS on the storage drives/partitions and EXT4 on the root partition. (These are for personal use.)
the8472 8y ago
It still lacks a handful of features for home use that btrfs offers. But btrfs raid5 is not stable enough. It's a pity.
- Mister_Snuggles 8y ago
  What sorts of features does btrfs offer home users that ZFS lacks? My experiences with btrfs have been somewhat mixed. On OpenSuse, I've found snapper to be an amazing lifesaver, but the regular system-crippling maintenance process[0] to be very frustrating. [0] https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/523354-High-CPU-load-related-to-btrfs-causes-lock-up https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/523354-High-CPU-l... - the thread implies that it is quota-related, but I've seen this happen on machines without quotas enabled.
  - ScottBurson 8y ago
    The big missing feature, IMO, is that you can't grow a vdev just by adding a disk -- you have to go through this rigmarole of swapping in a larger disk and resilvering, one at a time.
    - Mister_Snuggles 8y ago
      Yes, this is a huge pain point with ZFS. RAIDZ expansion is coming[0] though, so things are getting better. [0] https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/blog/openzfs-raid-z-online-expansion-project-announcement/ https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/blog/openzfs-raid-z-online...
  - cbolton 8y ago
    It's been a while since I played with btrfs but it was really nice to be able to dynamically add hard drives of any size to a volume and have the filesystem seamlessly balance the data between the drives with the requested replication factor.
  - the8472 8y ago
    Very flexible online resizing, re-striping and conversion between RAID levels of pools. On-demand deduplication instead of always-active. Reflink copy. On-demand compression and defragmentation. No ARC gobbling up memory (competes with page cache). NOCOW files.

TheAceOfHearts 8y ago

You can also use ZFS on Debian. I use it for my home server and I haven't had any issues. Although I'll note that I don't use ZFS on my boot device, just on storage HDDs. Booting from ZFS seemed like a hassle, without clear benefits.

Mister_Snuggles 8y ago
> Booting from ZFS seemed like a hassle, without clear benefits. On FreeBSD, ZFS is a first-class citizen. Root-on-ZFS is something that the installer can do and the bootloader understands. I've used root-on-ZFS through five FreeBSD versions (plus numerous minor versions), all upgraded using freebsd-update, with no issues. On Linux, ZFS seems to be an addon, so hassles are to be expected. As for benefits, Boot Environments[0][1] are a great reason for having root-on-ZFS. While I don't personally do this, I can definitely see the appeal of being able to roll back a major OS upgrade. [0] https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?beadm https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?beadm [1] https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/howto-freebsd-zfs-madness.31662/ https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/howto-freebsd-zfs-madness...
johannes1234321 8y ago
> Booting from ZFS seemed like a hassle, without clear benefits. On Solaris it is integrated with the package manager, thus on updates a snapshot is taken and if anything goes wrong one can revert to the previous state.
jeduardo 8y ago
> Booting from ZFS seemed like a hassle, without clear benefits. It used to be a major hassle around 2 years ago but since then things have evolved significantly, up to the point where as long as you follow the install instructions correctly the first time, you can trust it to just keep on working. One benefit (for me) is the ability of having full system snapshots taken periodically with minimum storage cost. I've used a setup on my personal workstation for years where a zfSnap job takes snapshots every hour. This has proven itself to be super convenient when accidents occur. Of course that the important data is backed up externally or committed to Git, but having the possibility to quickly revert mistakes is a big nice to have. Such a system could also be easily improved to ship these snapshots to an offsite location as incremental backups. Of course the same process can be done in many other ways, but it is also other thing nice to have. Another benefit I've had with this is portability between machines. My current Debian Stable system with ZFS on root began its life running out of an external HDD plugged onto an old Macbook Air. After I was able to get an external SSD and a Thunderbolt adapter, all I needed to do was to add the new device to the existing pool as a mirror and wait for resilvering, then remove the old device after all data was mirrored and the migration was done. When I finally got a new laptop, all I needed to do was to boot from the SSD and add the new NVMe device to the pool as a mirror, then remove the old SSD afterwards. There is also the transparent compression feature that can potentially save a lot of HDD space depending on the usage pattern of the particular system. And of course since ZFS is there present in your system (as it's the rootfs anyway!) you can use all other features you want, such as slicing volumes to use as root volumes for virtual machines or to use it as the backend for a local Docker host, where Docker can use an specific ZFS driver and leverage filesystem capabilities when storing images. Of course you don't need to run it as the rootfs for many of these things, but you if do like ZFS then the benefits, possibilities, and the fact that you can do it outweigh the (nowadays reduced) hassle. :)
hultner 8y ago
I’ve been using it on Debian for a about 3 years (and on FreeBSD almost 10 years), wouldn’t say that it has been without its problems on Debian but it seems mostly stable for home use. Had some problems in Debian 8/Jessie especially when upgrading to 9, used it professional on some hardware testing rigs a few years back but it was a bit more cumbersome then I had hoped (had to resort to FreeBSD live boot at one point to access our data. Haven’t had any problems in about a year now but only use it on one of my home servers running Debian. On FreeBSD it’s always been fantastic, same for illumos.
HankB99 8y ago
> Booting from ZFS seemed like a hassle, without clear benefits. I'm running ZFS on a single boot/user partition on an XPS 13 (9370.) I was unable to get the built in WiFi working with Debian Stretch but it seems to work well enough with testing (Buster.) I have apt-buglist and apt-listchanges (or similar) installed to warn me of possible problems, but I feel more comfortable thinking that I can roll back a system that becomes borked by a buggy upgrade. (Haven't had to do it yet.) Ordinarily I'd have a separate $HOME partition but I'm settling on a $HOME filesystem (which is covered by `rsync` backups.) It was a bit of a hassle but not IMO w/out benefits for my use case. I have other servers running Debian Stretch and Ubuntu 16.04 that are using ZFS on the storage drives/partitions and EXT4 on the root partition. (These are for personal use.)

the8472 8y ago

It still lacks a handful of features for home use that btrfs offers. But btrfs raid5 is not stable enough. It's a pity.

Mister_Snuggles 8y ago
What sorts of features does btrfs offer home users that ZFS lacks? My experiences with btrfs have been somewhat mixed. On OpenSuse, I've found snapper to be an amazing lifesaver, but the regular system-crippling maintenance process[0] to be very frustrating. [0] https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/523354-High-CPU-load-related-to-btrfs-causes-lock-up https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/523354-High-CPU-l... - the thread implies that it is quota-related, but I've seen this happen on machines without quotas enabled.
- ScottBurson 8y ago
  The big missing feature, IMO, is that you can't grow a vdev just by adding a disk -- you have to go through this rigmarole of swapping in a larger disk and resilvering, one at a time.
  - Mister_Snuggles 8y ago
    Yes, this is a huge pain point with ZFS. RAIDZ expansion is coming[0] though, so things are getting better. [0] https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/blog/openzfs-raid-z-online-expansion-project-announcement/ https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/blog/openzfs-raid-z-online...
- cbolton 8y ago
  It's been a while since I played with btrfs but it was really nice to be able to dynamically add hard drives of any size to a volume and have the filesystem seamlessly balance the data between the drives with the requested replication factor.
- the8472 8y ago
  Very flexible online resizing, re-striping and conversion between RAID levels of pools. On-demand deduplication instead of always-active. Reflink copy. On-demand compression and defragmentation. No ARC gobbling up memory (competes with page cache). NOCOW files.