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ZFS 2.3 released with ZFS raidz expansion

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Re: ZFS 2.3 released with ZFS raidz expansion

#81

Post by ekianjo »

wil421 wrote: post #77
poisonborz wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Way better data security, resilience against file rotting. This goes for both HDDs or SSDs. Copy-on-write, snapshots, end to end integrity. Also easier to extend the storage for safety/drive failure (and SSDs corrupt in a more sneaky way) with pools.

How many of us are using single disks on our laptops? I have a NAS and use all of the above but that doesn’t help people with single drive systems. Or help me understand why I would want it on my laptop.

It provides encryption by default without having to deal with LUKS. And no need to ever do fsck again.

Re: ZFS 2.3 released with ZFS raidz expansion

#83

Post by ryao »

wil421 wrote: post #77
poisonborz wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Way better data security, resilience against file rotting. This goes for both HDDs or SSDs. Copy-on-write, snapshots, end to end integrity. Also easier to extend the storage for safety/drive failure (and SSDs corrupt in a more sneaky way) with pools.

How many of us are using single disks on our laptops? I have a NAS and use all of the above but that doesn’t help people with single drive systems. Or help me understand why I would want it on my laptop.

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.

Re: ZFS 2.3 released with ZFS raidz expansion

#84

Post by jeroenhd »

poisonborz wrote: post #75
kwanbix wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question. As an end user that uses Windows and Linux and does not uses ZFS, what I am missing?

Way better data security, resilience against file rotting. This goes for both HDDs or SSDs. Copy-on-write, snapshots, end to end integrity. Also easier to extend the storage for safety/drive failure (and SSDs corrupt in a more sneaky way) with pools.

The data security and rot resilience only goes for systems with ECC memory. Correct data with a faulty checksum will be treated the same as incorrect data with a correct checksum.

Windows has its own extended filesystem through Storage Spaces, with many ZFS features added as lesser used Storage Spaces options, especially when combined with ReFS.

Re: ZFS 2.3 released with ZFS raidz expansion

#85

Post by e12e »

kwanbix wrote: post #64
poisonborz wrote: post #59

I just don't get it how the Windows world - by far the largest PC platform per userbase - still doesn't have any answer to ZFS. Microsoft had WinFS and then ReFS but it's on the backburner and while there is active development (Win11 ships some bits time to time) release is nowhere in sight. There are some lone warriors trying the giant task of creating a ZFS compatibility layer with some projects, but they are far f…

Honest question. As an end user that uses Windows and Linux and does not uses ZFS, what I am missing?

Cross platform native encryption with sane fs for removable media.

Re: ZFS 2.3 released with ZFS raidz expansion

#86

Post by ryao »

xattt wrote: post #79
GuB-42 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, the situation with Linux is barely better. ZFS has license issues with Linux, preventing full integration, and Btrfs is 15 years in the making and still doesn't match ZFS in features and stability. Most Linux distros still use ext4 by default, which is 19 years old, but ext4 is little more than a series of extensions on top of ext2, which is the same age as NTFS. In all fairness, there are few OS compon…

ZFS on OS X was killed because of Oracle licensing drama. I don’t expect anything better on Windows either.

There is a third party port here:

https://openzfsonosx.org/wiki/Main_Page

It was actually the NetApp lawsuit that caused problems for Apple’s adoption of ZFS. Apple wanted indemnification from Sun because of the lawsuit, Sun’s CEO did not sign the agreement before Oracle’s acquisition of Sun happened and Oracle had no interest in granting that, so the official Apple port was cancelled.

I heard this second hand years later from people who were insiders at Sun.

Re: ZFS 2.3 released with ZFS raidz expansion

#87

Post by NamTaf »

endorphine wrote: post #25

Can someone describe why they would use ZFS (or similar) for home usage?

I used it on my home NAS (4x3TB drives, holding all of my family's backups, etc.) for the data security / checksumming features. IMO it's performant, robust and well-designed in ways that give me reassurance regarding data integrity and help prevent me shooting myself in the foot.

Re: ZFS 2.3 released with ZFS raidz expansion

#88

Post by jeroenhd »

ryao wrote: post #69
happosai wrote: post #61

The annual reminder that if Oracle wanted to contribute positively to the Linux ecosystem, they would update the CDDL license ZFS uses to GPL compatible.

This is the annual reply that Oracle cannot change the OpenZFS license because OpenZFS contributors removed the “or any later version” part of the license from their contributions. By the way, comments such as yours seem to assume that Oracle is somehow involved with OpenZFS. Oracle has no connection with OpenZFS outside of owning copyright on the original OpenSolaris sources and a few tiny commits their employees co…

Is there a reason the OpenZFS contributors don't want to dual-license their code? I'm not too familiar with the CDDL but I'm not sure what advantage it brings to an open source project compared to something like GPL? Having to deal with DKMS is one of the reasons why I'm sticking with BTRFS for doing ZFS-like stuff.

Re: ZFS 2.3 released with ZFS raidz expansion

#89

Post by fourfour3 »

lousken wrote: post #74
GuB-42 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, the situation with Linux is barely better. ZFS has license issues with Linux, preventing full integration, and Btrfs is 15 years in the making and still doesn't match ZFS in features and stability. Most Linux distros still use ext4 by default, which is 19 years old, but ext4 is little more than a series of extensions on top of ext2, which is the same age as NTFS. In all fairness, there are few OS compon…

as far as stability goes, btrfs is used by meta, synology and many others, so I wouldn't say it's not stable, but some features are lacking

Do Synology actually use the multi-device options of btrfs, or are they using linux softraid + lvm underneath?

I know Synology Hybrid RAID is a clever use of LVM + MD raid, for example.

Re: ZFS 2.3 released with ZFS raidz expansion

#90

Post by lazide »

e12e wrote: post #85
kwanbix wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question. As an end user that uses Windows and Linux and does not uses ZFS, what I am missing?

Cross platform native encryption with sane fs for removable media.

Who would that help?

MacOS also defaults to a non-portable FS for likely similar reasons, if one was being cynical.

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