Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

ZFSBootMenu – A boot loader to manage ZFS boot environments for Linux

zfsbootmenu.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 66 posts

Re: ZFSBootMenu – A boot loader to manage ZFS boot environments for Linux

#51

Post by zaarn »

esjeon wrote: post #24

I tried this alongside Void Linux, but I found I don't really need it. TBH, this is really cool. I liked that I'm able to choose snapshots for booting - a very good recovery option. The interface is well polished, and comes with fzf for quick searching. It's a true dream for distro hoppers, since ZFS works like thin-provisioned partitions (though distro options are limited due to ZFS). Pretty cool in and out. But it…

For me the big selling point is that it supports booting encrypted ZFS with zstd compression and other modern features enabled. So your boot pool doesn't have to be restricted to the GRUB set while still giving you all the goddies (and more, since you can just drop to a linux shell)

Re: ZFSBootMenu – A boot loader to manage ZFS boot environments for Linux

#52

Post by WastingMyTime89 »

throw0101c wrote: post #31
PlutoIsAPlanet wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but only a kernel so it is in my opinion not really right to say that it has no support. The kernel has no native support for ZFS. Ubuntu may ship with ZFS, but that's one distro. Meanwhile, RHEL etc won't even touch it. On Linux, XFS dominates and likely will continue to dominate the server world, meanwhile btrfs will slowly erase ext4 in the desktop side of things. Android/Embedded have always used their own diff…

> The kernel has no native support for ZFS. Neither does it have accelerated Nvidia card support that could be used for things like HPC/AI/ML. Yet I'm administrating an entire cluster of Ubuntu machines with cards just fine. We generally use the "nvidia-driver-NNN-server" package. If you want to live ideologically pure no one is going to stop you, but someone of us need to get work done.

It’s not about ideological purity. I don’t want to touch anything a serious Linux distribution won’t support and I don’t consider Ubuntu - a derivative of the over-patched mess that is Debian - a serious distribution.

ZFS is in a very weird position on Linux. It’s unfortunate but that’s mostly due to Sun and Oracle so I don’t feel bad stating people shouldn’t use it.

Re: ZFSBootMenu – A boot loader to manage ZFS boot environments for Linux

#53

Post by lmz »

ninefathom wrote: post #48
nortonham wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what do you use OpenIndiana for? >This capability was something of which the lack on Linux has long puzzled me. Agreed. I recently tried out OI "hipster" and the way boot environments are integrated into caja (the file manager) with Time Slider was so smooth it got me thinking why something like it wasn't more popular in linux.

> what do you use OpenIndiana for? I find that it's a good fit for quite a few things, but if you're looking for a specific example: clustered Java application stacks, like ELK or Hadoop. Zones, crossbow networking, SMF, and ZFS w/ BEs all working seamlessly together is a fantastic combination for easy-button admin of low- or zero-downtime clustered applications.

https://ptribble.blogspot.com/2021/12/keeping-java-alive-on-... says upstream has removed Solaris Java support for the newer versions.

Re: ZFSBootMenu – A boot loader to manage ZFS boot environments for Linux

#54

Post by dfc »

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #52
throw0101c wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The kernel has no native support for ZFS. Neither does it have accelerated Nvidia card support that could be used for things like HPC/AI/ML. Yet I'm administrating an entire cluster of Ubuntu machines with cards just fine. We generally use the "nvidia-driver-NNN-server" package. If you want to live ideologically pure no one is going to stop you, but someone of us need to get work done.

It’s not about ideological purity. I don’t want to touch anything a serious Linux distribution won’t support and I don’t consider Ubuntu - a derivative of the over-patched mess that is Debian - a serious distribution. ZFS is in a very weird position on Linux. It’s unfortunate but that’s mostly due to Sun and Oracle so I don’t feel bad stating people shouldn’t use it.

What packages do you think are overly patched in Debian?

Re: ZFSBootMenu – A boot loader to manage ZFS boot environments for Linux

#55

Post by contingencies »

ninefathom wrote: post #16

I'm glad to see interest in this functionality taking off in Linux-land. I think there are one or two other projects with similar goals (i.e. implementing BE selection on Linux) and it might be time for me to do a side-by-side. This capability was something of which the lack on Linux has long puzzled me. Solaris actually implemented a very early incarnation of this ability (called "live upgrades" at the time from its…

FreeBSD implemented it around 2012, in the early days of their ZFS work

I definitely recall using ZFS on FreeBSD in 2010, and no part of the experience suggested it was immature at that point. Full disclosure: used it explicitly for ZFS, and haven't used it since.

Re: ZFSBootMenu – A boot loader to manage ZFS boot environments for Linux

#56

Post by PlutoIsAPlanet »

kobalsky wrote: post #41
nailer wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why you’d consider criticism of ZFS to he snark. Running any filesystem outside the mainline kernel is a bunch of extra effort and I’m sure as a ZFS user you’d know that. I’m not sure how ZFS could be “hugely successful” after two decades and still not in the Linux kernel.

> Running any filesystem outside the mainline kernel is a bunch of extra effort and I’m sure as a ZFS user you’d know that zfs-dkms makes usage simple since openzfs backwards compatible down to 3.xx kernels. no need to mix match zfs with kernel versions anymore. the only drawback is that you may not get to use the lastest kernel until openzfs mantainers give it the thumbs up (no 6.xx compatible release yet), but that…

IIRC the kernel module also uses a compatibility layer, which is also unlikely to ever be accepted.

So its a technical issue too

Re: ZFSBootMenu – A boot loader to manage ZFS boot environments for Linux

#57

Post by PlutoIsAPlanet »

throw0101c wrote: post #31
PlutoIsAPlanet wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but only a kernel so it is in my opinion not really right to say that it has no support. The kernel has no native support for ZFS. Ubuntu may ship with ZFS, but that's one distro. Meanwhile, RHEL etc won't even touch it. On Linux, XFS dominates and likely will continue to dominate the server world, meanwhile btrfs will slowly erase ext4 in the desktop side of things. Android/Embedded have always used their own diff…

> The kernel has no native support for ZFS. Neither does it have accelerated Nvidia card support that could be used for things like HPC/AI/ML. Yet I'm administrating an entire cluster of Ubuntu machines with cards just fine. We generally use the "nvidia-driver-NNN-server" package. If you want to live ideologically pure no one is going to stop you, but someone of us need to get work done.

It's not about ideologies, using modules outside the kernel is never a good experience for those who use up-to-date distros (e.g. Arch, Fedora etc).

Re: ZFSBootMenu – A boot loader to manage ZFS boot environments for Linux

#58

Post by [deleted] »

lmz wrote: post #53
ninefathom wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what do you use OpenIndiana for? I find that it's a good fit for quite a few things, but if you're looking for a specific example: clustered Java application stacks, like ELK or Hadoop. Zones, crossbow networking, SMF, and ZFS w/ BEs all working seamlessly together is a fantastic combination for easy-button admin of low- or zero-downtime clustered applications.

https://ptribble.blogspot.com/2021/12/keeping-java-alive-on-... says upstream has removed Solaris Java support for the newer versions.

[deleted]

Re: ZFSBootMenu – A boot loader to manage ZFS boot environments for Linux

#59

Post by throw0101c »

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #52
throw0101c wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The kernel has no native support for ZFS. Neither does it have accelerated Nvidia card support that could be used for things like HPC/AI/ML. Yet I'm administrating an entire cluster of Ubuntu machines with cards just fine. We generally use the "nvidia-driver-NNN-server" package. If you want to live ideologically pure no one is going to stop you, but someone of us need to get work done.

It’s not about ideological purity. I don’t want to touch anything a serious Linux distribution won’t support and I don’t consider Ubuntu - a derivative of the over-patched mess that is Debian - a serious distribution. ZFS is in a very weird position on Linux. It’s unfortunate but that’s mostly due to Sun and Oracle so I don’t feel bad stating people shouldn’t use it.

> I don’t want to touch anything a serious Linux distribution won’t support and I don’t consider Ubuntu - a derivative of the over-patched mess that is Debian - a serious distribution.

What defines a "serious distribution"?

Re: ZFSBootMenu – A boot loader to manage ZFS boot environments for Linux

#60

Post by ghaff »

yakak wrote: post #46
kobalsky wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I find it unfortunate that all the effort that has gone into ZFS as essentially a hobbyist copy-on-write filesystem didn't go into btrfs instead. don't some BSDs and Linux share the same code base for ZFS? Last I heard FreeBSD switched to ZfsOnLinux as upstream a few years ago before it was merged with OpenZFS. IMO calling it a hobbyist fs is a bit unfair.

Being called hobbyist software derisively by the Linux community is like being knighted, I assume.

It's not intended to be derisive so much as a simple matter of fact that it's 1.) Not in the mainline kernel; 2.) Isn't supported by most commercial distros; and 3.) Has somewhat ambiguous legal status. For individual use? Knock yourself out. But I wouldn't approve its use for a company unless I had very good and very specific reasons to do so.
Post reply on HN