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I switched away from ZFS on root after using it for about a year. There were no actual problems, but I could never get over the fact that it's so complicated un

I switched away from ZFS on root after using it for about a year. There were no actual problems, but I could never get over the fact that it's so complicated underneath I have to relearn everything every time I do any sort of advanced maintenance. For example, I had to move between SSDs which is an absolutely trivial operation with any other filesystem if you know your Linux well. It took me maybe three hours of work on ZFS because it brings its own environment and does everything its own way, so I had to remember and re-discover a lot of stuff. The system booted on maybe 15th try. If you are fine with this, or you're not going to use it on root, or you are a FreeBSD user, it's an excellent choice for pretty much any task.

vetinari 3y ago
I have zfs root on ubuntu; moving to another ssd was trivial: add the second drive, recreate the partition scheme (esp, bpool, rpool), add them as mirrors to existing pools, and while waiting while it mirrors up, reinstall grub on the new esp. After mirroring is done, check fstab for UUIDs, reboot, check, whether everything is ok, remove the old drive from the mirror. Done. Though I consider zfs to be nice, I'm willing to use it only with distributions, where it comes with the distribution, built for the distro kernel (i.e. ubuntu or proxmox). In the past, I've wasted too much time with dkms, failing to build the kernel modules, or kABI modules failing to load, or other problems that left me without root filesystem at reboot. That's not an experience I'd like to repeat. Also, btrfs is nice too ;).
waynesonfire 3y ago
Is the integration of root zfs on linux complicated? I saw some info-graphic and it looked like there were a lot of pieces to stitch it together. Is it fragile? Regardless, I'm surprised your one-year with ZFS didn't convinced you that it's worthwhile to invest in its mastery. The filesystem will pay dividends for your entire compute life-time and not only save your data but hours of maintenance over that time. Major downgrade moving away from it in my view. On a side note, FreeBSD is great and worth investing in as well. I still have more to learn but the journey has been wonderful and I will not be using Linux in the next iteration of my home / lab server and hobby projects.

vetinari 3y ago

I have zfs root on ubuntu; moving to another ssd was trivial: add the second drive, recreate the partition scheme (esp, bpool, rpool), add them as mirrors to existing pools, and while waiting while it mirrors up, reinstall grub on the new esp. After mirroring is done, check fstab for UUIDs, reboot, check, whether everything is ok, remove the old drive from the mirror. Done. Though I consider zfs to be nice, I'm willing to use it only with distributions, where it comes with the distribution, built for the distro kernel (i.e. ubuntu or proxmox). In the past, I've wasted too much time with dkms, failing to build the kernel modules, or kABI modules failing to load, or other problems that left me without root filesystem at reboot. That's not an experience I'd like to repeat. Also, btrfs is nice too ;).

waynesonfire 3y ago

Is the integration of root zfs on linux complicated? I saw some info-graphic and it looked like there were a lot of pieces to stitch it together. Is it fragile? Regardless, I'm surprised your one-year with ZFS didn't convinced you that it's worthwhile to invest in its mastery. The filesystem will pay dividends for your entire compute life-time and not only save your data but hours of maintenance over that time. Major downgrade moving away from it in my view. On a side note, FreeBSD is great and worth investing in as well. I still have more to learn but the journey has been wonderful and I will not be using Linux in the next iteration of my home / lab server and hobby projects.