3 ms·

My main issue with ZFS is the integrated nature - like systemd for filesystems. My 'alternative' for ZFS isn't BTRFS (awful performance characteristics for my w

My main issue with ZFS is the integrated nature - like systemd for filesystems. My 'alternative' for ZFS isn't BTRFS (awful performance characteristics for my workloads) but LVM coupled with ext4 and mdraid. I get snapshots, reliability, performance and a 'real UNIX' composable toolchain. I miss out on data checksums.

riku_iki 5y ago
No compression..
- bombcar 5y ago
  You could use VDO (I never have) https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/8/html/deduplicating_and_compressing_logical_volumes_on_rhel/con_introduction-to-vdo-on-lvm_deduplicating-and-compressing-logical-volumes https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp...
e12e 5y ago
In principle I dislike the coupling of volume manager, raid and filesystem. But I still think zfs gets most things right; I see the argument for a concistent system managing caching/logs, volumes, data integrity, discard support, compression, snapshots and encryption. The fact that it's the first serious, open, cross platform solution (Linux, bsd, Mac, winnt) that provides encryption, integrity and filesystem is a nice bonus. And the integration of snapshots and fs dumps via zfs send/receive is beautiful. I think zfs makes sense like one fat layer - networking can go below (drdb, iscsi) or on top (iscsi, nfs, cifs). Encryption need to be somewhat holistic - for making sane performance and data leaking tradeoffs.
salmo 5y ago
Having run all these thing in prod (except BTRFS, it ate a mirror on my desktop), I’ll say that even the LVM + + is so much more hacky than geom on FreeBSD which feels much more ‘Unix’ with a designed composable interface. Although, I do prefer the durability of XFS or ext4 (depending on workload) vs UFS, and the setup you described is totally maintainable.

3 ms·

My main issue with ZFS is the integrated nature - like systemd for filesystems. My 'alternative' for ZFS isn't BTRFS (awful performance characteristics for my w

by arid_eden 5y ago

riku_iki 5y ago
No compression..
- bombcar 5y ago
  You could use VDO (I never have) https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/8/html/deduplicating_and_compressing_logical_volumes_on_rhel/con_introduction-to-vdo-on-lvm_deduplicating-and-compressing-logical-volumes https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp...
e12e 5y ago
In principle I dislike the coupling of volume manager, raid and filesystem. But I still think zfs gets most things right; I see the argument for a concistent system managing caching/logs, volumes, data integrity, discard support, compression, snapshots and encryption. The fact that it's the first serious, open, cross platform solution (Linux, bsd, Mac, winnt) that provides encryption, integrity and filesystem is a nice bonus. And the integration of snapshots and fs dumps via zfs send/receive is beautiful. I think zfs makes sense like one fat layer - networking can go below (drdb, iscsi) or on top (iscsi, nfs, cifs). Encryption need to be somewhat holistic - for making sane performance and data leaking tradeoffs.
salmo 5y ago
Having run all these thing in prod (except BTRFS, it ate a mirror on my desktop), I’ll say that even the LVM + + is so much more hacky than geom on FreeBSD which feels much more ‘Unix’ with a designed composable interface. Although, I do prefer the durability of XFS or ext4 (depending on workload) vs UFS, and the setup you described is totally maintainable.