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My thinkpad from college uses ZFS as its rootfs. The benefits are: * If the hard drive / SSD corrupted blocks, the corruption would be identified. * Ditto
by ryao 2y ago
My thinkpad from college uses ZFS as its rootfs. The benefits are:
* If the hard drive / SSD corrupted blocks, the corruption would be identified.
* Ditto blocks allow for self healing. Usually, this only applies to metadata, but if you set copies=2, you can get this on data too. It is a poor man’s RAID.
* ARC made the desktop environment very responsive since unlike the LRU cache, ARC resists cold cache effects from transient IO workloads.
* Transparent compression allowed me to store more on the laptop than otherwise possible.
* Snapshots and rollback allowed me to do risky experiments and undo them as if nothing happened.
* Backups were easy via send/receive of snapshots.
* If the battery dies while you are doing things, you can boot without any damage to the filesystem.
That said, I use a MacBook these days when I need to go outside. While I miss ZFS on it, I have not felt motivated to try to get a ZFS rootfs on it since the last I checked, Apple hardcoded the assumption that the rootfs is one of its own filesystems into the XNU kernel and other parts of the system.
- CoolCold 2y agoNTFS had compression since mot even sure when. For other stuff, let that nerdy CorpIT handle your system.
- ryao 2y agoNTFS compression is slow and has a low compression ratio. ZFS has both zstd and lz4.
- adgjlsfhk1 2y agoyes but NTFS is bad enough that no one needs to be told how bad it is.
- rabf 2y agoNot ever having to deal with partitions and instead using data sets each of which can have their own properties such as compression, size quota, encryption etc is another benefit. Also using zfsbootmenu instead of grub enables booting from different datasets or snapshots as well as mounting and fixing data sets all from the bootloader!
- artificialLimbs 2y agoAlright that's a bit mind blowing. TIL. Thank you. =)