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I was pretty active in ZOL when encryption was added. It was handshakes and applause all around... but shortly afterwards the developer started contributing l

I was pretty active in ZOL when encryption was added. It was handshakes and applause all around... but shortly afterwards the developer started contributing less and less, while several bugs cropped up... some necessitating sending entire hard drive images over ssh to other developers. Don't get me wrong, I like zfs and use it every day, but that code should have never been merged, and given more scrutiny considering it completely changes how your data is written to disk. Thankfully not many people use encryption.

rincebrain 3y ago
As much as I lament the status of native encryption in OpenZFS, and think it would have been better to merge it with more testing, I think what I find to be really more problematic is the lack of enough fixing afterward. Software is buggy, and it's going to have bugs you don't find no matter how much you tested it. The problem was that (AFAIR) one developer at the company that developed this contributed fixes, and then he left, and then almost nobody did.
- nubinetwork 3y ago
  I think people were more interested in giving Oracle the finger than anything, considering missing feature parity and compatibility were constantly waved in our faces. (Not that ZOL encryption is compatible at all with Oracle's code) I often wonder if encryption would have been merged if Matt had usurped ZOL sooner.
  - rincebrain 3y ago
    "usurp" is an interesting word for "decide ZoL was the project of record and replace the illumos reference platform with it", and since Matt was the one who said no because there's no mitigation other than not using it when I wanted to put a warning in the docs about it, I wouldn't anticipate him doing anything positive.
    - nubinetwork 3y ago
      Sorry, I might still be a bit salty about how that all went down years ago. Not to mention, some of my documentation changes got reverted in the process, as well as my name being stripped off other documentation entirely.
      - rincebrain 3y ago
        I don't think my creation and abandonment of this spreadsheet suggests I'm not frustrated either. That's unfortunate, stripping anyone's name off anything is always unpleasant and shouldn't happen. I rather wish they hadn't just serialized a snapshot of the wiki out into GH pages and then said "just open PRs to edit this", but here we are, I guess.
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - transpute 3y ago
        What's the best way to catch up on those historical events? Web search yielded https://papers.freebsd.org/2019/BSDCan/jude-The_Future_of_OpenZFS_and_FreeBSD.files/jude-The_Future_of_OpenZFS_and_FreeBSD.pdf https://papers.freebsd.org/2019/BSDCan/jude-The_Future_of_Op...
        nubinetwork 3y ago
        I found this, although some of the other information might no longer exist due to the changes at the time. https://zfsonlinux.topicbox.com/groups/zfs-discuss/T13eedc32607dab41 https://zfsonlinux.topicbox.com/groups/zfs-discuss/T13eedc32...
didntcheck 3y ago
I was really surprised when I found out how late-added and immature encryption in ZFS is. I had presumed it would have been table stakes for "enterprise" deployments. Were people just using it on top of block encryption like GELI or LUKS or was I just wrong to assume that most servers are encrypted?
- nubinetwork 3y ago
  I want to say yes, but putting zfs on luks could leave you with issues where you couldn't import the pool, I wouldn't recommend it personally. I believe FreeBSD didn't have any qualms with putting zfs on geli, but I'm not the best person to ask about that. In what little I've used FreeBSD, I never bothered with geli.
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    I use it on top of geli and it works great. <3 on my daily driver which I sometimes hard reset too. Not sure what the issues are with luks, as I'm mainly on FreeBSD.
    - nubinetwork 3y ago
      A lot of it boils down to "zfs thinks the data is on disk, but is still being passed through the encryption layer, then something bad happened like a power outage or corruption at the encryption layer"
      - rincebrain 3y ago
        At least the ones I'm familiar with boil down to "there is a logic bug in the encryption layer where some settings get munged" or "there is a memory correctness bug in some edge cases with the weird double-existence that was plumbed in for having encrypted and unencrypted buffers violating expectations in places".

rincebrain 3y ago

As much as I lament the status of native encryption in OpenZFS, and think it would have been better to merge it with more testing, I think what I find to be really more problematic is the lack of enough fixing afterward. Software is buggy, and it's going to have bugs you don't find no matter how much you tested it. The problem was that (AFAIR) one developer at the company that developed this contributed fixes, and then he left, and then almost nobody did.

nubinetwork 3y ago
I think people were more interested in giving Oracle the finger than anything, considering missing feature parity and compatibility were constantly waved in our faces. (Not that ZOL encryption is compatible at all with Oracle's code) I often wonder if encryption would have been merged if Matt had usurped ZOL sooner.
- rincebrain 3y ago
  "usurp" is an interesting word for "decide ZoL was the project of record and replace the illumos reference platform with it", and since Matt was the one who said no because there's no mitigation other than not using it when I wanted to put a warning in the docs about it, I wouldn't anticipate him doing anything positive.
  - nubinetwork 3y ago
    Sorry, I might still be a bit salty about how that all went down years ago. Not to mention, some of my documentation changes got reverted in the process, as well as my name being stripped off other documentation entirely.
    - rincebrain 3y ago
      I don't think my creation and abandonment of this spreadsheet suggests I'm not frustrated either. That's unfortunate, stripping anyone's name off anything is always unpleasant and shouldn't happen. I rather wish they hadn't just serialized a snapshot of the wiki out into GH pages and then said "just open PRs to edit this", but here we are, I guess.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
    - transpute 3y ago
      What's the best way to catch up on those historical events? Web search yielded https://papers.freebsd.org/2019/BSDCan/jude-The_Future_of_OpenZFS_and_FreeBSD.files/jude-The_Future_of_OpenZFS_and_FreeBSD.pdf https://papers.freebsd.org/2019/BSDCan/jude-The_Future_of_Op...
      - nubinetwork 3y ago
        I found this, although some of the other information might no longer exist due to the changes at the time. https://zfsonlinux.topicbox.com/groups/zfs-discuss/T13eedc32607dab41 https://zfsonlinux.topicbox.com/groups/zfs-discuss/T13eedc32...

didntcheck 3y ago

I was really surprised when I found out how late-added and immature encryption in ZFS is. I had presumed it would have been table stakes for "enterprise" deployments. Were people just using it on top of block encryption like GELI or LUKS or was I just wrong to assume that most servers are encrypted?

nubinetwork 3y ago
I want to say yes, but putting zfs on luks could leave you with issues where you couldn't import the pool, I wouldn't recommend it personally. I believe FreeBSD didn't have any qualms with putting zfs on geli, but I'm not the best person to ask about that. In what little I've used FreeBSD, I never bothered with geli.
- wkat4242 3y ago
  I use it on top of geli and it works great. <3 on my daily driver which I sometimes hard reset too. Not sure what the issues are with luks, as I'm mainly on FreeBSD.
  - nubinetwork 3y ago
    A lot of it boils down to "zfs thinks the data is on disk, but is still being passed through the encryption layer, then something bad happened like a power outage or corruption at the encryption layer"
    - rincebrain 3y ago
      At least the ones I'm familiar with boil down to "there is a logic bug in the encryption layer where some settings get munged" or "there is a memory correctness bug in some edge cases with the weird double-existence that was plumbed in for having encrypted and unencrypted buffers violating expectations in places".