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> That said, I think he is laying a good foundation (from what I have heard/read about his development process), but there are many times when the best of us ha

by csdvrx 3y ago

> That said, I think he is laying a good foundation (from what I have heard/read about his development process), but there are many times when the best of us have been confident in code that turned out to have problems and I doubt he is an exception to this. For mixed storages, bcachefs will be interesting. For RAID1, another option is any filesystem over dm-integrity over mdadm: dm-integrity can protect against silent file corruption if used below the mdadm level: any filesystem reading inconsistent data + checksum at dm-integrity level would cause dm-integrity to give a EILSEQ to mdadm, which should recover data from the mirrors. It's done with a cryptsetup step, and explained on https://gist.github.com/MawKKe/caa2bbf7edcc072129d73b61ae7815fb https://gist.github.com/MawKKe/caa2bbf7edcc072129d73b61ae781... Main advantages: 1. it's a "bring your own filesystem" (ex: XFS, EXT4): you add protection against bitrot to any filesystem 2. dm-integrity may be newer, but mdadm and XFS have a large user base, making them well tested. 3. you can test this approach by simulating bitflips on the underlying data device, reading from the /dev/mapper entry, reading files themselves, doing a scrub etc. 4. you can select other algorithms besides crc32: in the rare case the error couldn't be seen by crc32 (which is likely to be applied at the hardware level) you gain an extra layer of safety

aforwardslash 3y ago
The level of simplicity of ZFS has no equivalent in Linux; the whole lvm stack is a fuckup from a usability perspective. Half a dozen distinct commands working on different layers that - more often than not - are conceptual. ZFS has been around for almost 20 years now. It was production ready more than 10 years ago, when it was open-sourced. Having your systems 1 or 2 versions behind the mainline is good practice in every mission-critical piece of software.
- dither8 3y ago
  As someone who just installed OpenZFS on Linux, I agree with you totally. ZFS just is, no need to worry about layering device mappers and LVM. The automount is also very nice.
- nortonham 3y ago
  I just benefited from ZFS boot environments/snaphsots during the update of FreeBSD from 13.2 to 14.0-release. It's a great tool to have at your disposal
- csdvrx 3y ago
  > Having your systems 1 or 2 versions behind the mainline is good practice in every mission-critical piece of software. I do that, and I've even personally experienced a few rare ZFS bugs that seem due to interactions between ZFS and Western Digital firmwares. Still, I was caught unprepared: I have several backups not stored on ZFS, but all of them were made FROM a ZFS source, meaning they are now all suspicious since silent corruption has been possible since version 2.1.4, and maybe even longer than that. ZFS is practical to use, but for now I think I'll keep a history of file checksums, like how it was done before bitrot protection.
  - aforwardslash 3y ago
    Still, that could happen with any other FS. Silent corruption is actually quite more common than winning the lottery, so in that regard ZFS is actually a good step on reducing those odds, even if its not zero (like advertised in the package). I'm also assuming those backups aren't actually ZFS streams (from zfs send|receive) which is a special case of "bugs biting you twice" :P

by csdvrx 3y ago

aforwardslash 3y ago

The level of simplicity of ZFS has no equivalent in Linux; the whole lvm stack is a fuckup from a usability perspective. Half a dozen distinct commands working on different layers that - more often than not - are conceptual. ZFS has been around for almost 20 years now. It was production ready more than 10 years ago, when it was open-sourced. Having your systems 1 or 2 versions behind the mainline is good practice in every mission-critical piece of software.

dither8 3y ago
As someone who just installed OpenZFS on Linux, I agree with you totally. ZFS just is, no need to worry about layering device mappers and LVM. The automount is also very nice.
nortonham 3y ago
I just benefited from ZFS boot environments/snaphsots during the update of FreeBSD from 13.2 to 14.0-release. It's a great tool to have at your disposal
csdvrx 3y ago
> Having your systems 1 or 2 versions behind the mainline is good practice in every mission-critical piece of software. I do that, and I've even personally experienced a few rare ZFS bugs that seem due to interactions between ZFS and Western Digital firmwares. Still, I was caught unprepared: I have several backups not stored on ZFS, but all of them were made FROM a ZFS source, meaning they are now all suspicious since silent corruption has been possible since version 2.1.4, and maybe even longer than that. ZFS is practical to use, but for now I think I'll keep a history of file checksums, like how it was done before bitrot protection.
- aforwardslash 3y ago
  Still, that could happen with any other FS. Silent corruption is actually quite more common than winning the lottery, so in that regard ZFS is actually a good step on reducing those odds, even if its not zero (like advertised in the package). I'm also assuming those backups aren't actually ZFS streams (from zfs send|receive) which is a special case of "bugs biting you twice" :P