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Btrfs has not been, is currently not, and unlikely in future to become a general population usable file system, which is a shame as 10 years ago it looked like

Btrfs has not been, is currently not, and unlikely in future to become a general population usable file system, which is a shame as 10 years ago it looked like a promising move forward. Its window to it was when setting up ZFS included lots of hand-waving. That window now has closed. ZFS is sable, does not eat data, does not have a cult of wizards spelling "RTFM" and is can be installed in major distributions using easy to follow procedure. In a year or two I expect that procedure to be fully automated, to a point where one could do a root on ZFS.

drbawb 5y ago
I haven't tried this yet but supposedly the Ubuntu installer can setup ZFS on root for a very basic[1] install. (i.e: No redundancy, and no encryption. The former one could trivially add after the fact by attaching a mirror & doing a scrub. The latter you could also do post-install w/ some zfs send+recv shenanigans, and maybe some initramfs changes.) I do use the Ubuntu live image pretty regularly when I need to import zpools in a preboot environment and it works great. In general it's not my favorite distro - but I'm happy to see they're doing some of the leg work to bring ZFS to a wider audience. [1]: https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/Getting%20Started/Ubuntu/Ubuntu%2020.04%20Root%20on%20ZFS.html#ubuntu-installer https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/Getting%20Started/Ubu...
- paulmd 5y ago
  There's also a more full-featured guide in the OpenZFS wiki for setting up more complex configurations (mirrors, encryption, etc) for ZFS-on-root.
wolrah 5y ago
> In a year or two I expect that procedure to be fully automated, to a point where one could do a root on ZFS. Ubuntu has been able to install directly to root-on-ZFS automatically since 20.04. I don't think any other major distros are as aggressive about supporting ZFS due to the licensing problem, but the software is already there.

drbawb 5y ago

I haven't tried this yet but supposedly the Ubuntu installer can setup ZFS on root for a very basic[1] install. (i.e: No redundancy, and no encryption. The former one could trivially add after the fact by attaching a mirror & doing a scrub. The latter you could also do post-install w/ some zfs send+recv shenanigans, and maybe some initramfs changes.) I do use the Ubuntu live image pretty regularly when I need to import zpools in a preboot environment and it works great. In general it's not my favorite distro - but I'm happy to see they're doing some of the leg work to bring ZFS to a wider audience. [1]: https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/Getting%20Started/Ubuntu/Ubuntu%2020.04%20Root%20on%20ZFS.html#ubuntu-installer https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/Getting%20Started/Ubu...

paulmd 5y ago
There's also a more full-featured guide in the OpenZFS wiki for setting up more complex configurations (mirrors, encryption, etc) for ZFS-on-root.

wolrah 5y ago

> In a year or two I expect that procedure to be fully automated, to a point where one could do a root on ZFS. Ubuntu has been able to install directly to root-on-ZFS automatically since 20.04. I don't think any other major distros are as aggressive about supporting ZFS due to the licensing problem, but the software is already there.