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

zfsbootmenu.org

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

#21

Post by erk__ »

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #19
knaekhoved wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you say "normally", do you mean "badly, with fsck"? ZFS is growing incredibly quickly in popularity, and the only reason it's not the dominant filesystem already is because A) it took linux a long time to add support, and only dedicated appliance vendors had the will and ability to move to freebsd and B) macos was going to switch to zfs in the late '00s, but they got scared off by oracle's legal shenanigans, whi…

> A) it took linux a long time to add support Linux has no support for ZFS. This is an out-of-tree patch set and therefor a no-go for most including myself. ZFS intentionally has a terrible license and is owned by Oracle. People are free to do what they want but I wish all the time wasted on it could have been put in something more interesting.

As with most thinks in the linux world it depends on who builds your upstream. ZFS is in the kernel distributed by Ubuntu which is one of the largest distributions.

Linux is unlike Eg freebsd not a monolithic operating system, but only a kernel so it is in my opinion not really right to say that it has no support.

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

#23

Post by PlutoIsAPlanet »

erk__ wrote: post #21
WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A) it took linux a long time to add support Linux has no support for ZFS. This is an out-of-tree patch set and therefor a no-go for most including myself. ZFS intentionally has a terrible license and is owned by Oracle. People are free to do what they want but I wish all the time wasted on it could have been put in something more interesting.

As with most thinks in the linux world it depends on who builds your upstream. ZFS is in the kernel distributed by Ubuntu which is one of the largest distributions. Linux is unlike Eg freebsd not a monolithic operating system, but only a kernel so it is in my opinion not really right to say that it has no support.

> 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 different filesystems so it's irrelevant there.

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

#24

Post by esjeon »

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 turned out to be a super-overkill for me. Firstly, I stopped dual-booting like a decade ago. I run everything else in VMs. Secondly, the host system these days hardly breaks. Lots of things work out-of-box unlike old days, and service settings can be isolated in containers. Thirdly, my host environment can be recreated within an hour including the download time and few trims, as long as `/home` is backed up. So I don't worry much about the root partition.

I wonder how this is working for others.

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

#25

Post by willis936 »

seized wrote: post #20

Boot environments are one of those magic features that when you've used it, it's hard to give up. My NAS has long been on OpenIndiana. Boot environments mean zero risk OS upgrades. At one point I could have gone back to a 4 year old OS version and booted it with no data loss. You can create one at any time, so it brings an even better take on VM snapshots to the physical machine world. Hacking on something and want a…

I've never used a boot environment. Is there a way to use a boot environment to have a ZFS-backed Windows install?

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

#26

Post by magicalhippo »

nailer wrote: post #6

I mean you can’t maintain ZFS normally, and people have been trying to make zfs happen for what… two decades now?

> people have been trying to make zfs happen for what… two decades now?

When players like AWS provides ZFS as one of four alternatives in their "filesystem as a service"[1], I'd say we're beyond "trying to make zfs happen".

Not to mention the PB worth of data others[2] rely on ZFS to keep safe.

[1]: https://aws.amazon.com/fsx/

[2]: https://openzfs.org/wiki/Companies

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

#27

Post by ploxiln »

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…

(without having read the article) after-update filesystem rollback sounds like what Suse has offered for about 10 years: https://www.suse.com/c/introduction-system-rollbacks-btrfs-a...

There just hasn't been much demand for it. There are a bunch of other mechanisms used instead, like redundant systems and gradual rollouts, working with full system images (or container images) instead, etc.

For personal-ish systems, things are reliable enough, and if there is a problem you can't just stop updating, you'll need to fix it soon anyway. I've been updating a debian install on my home fileserver for 3 major debian releases, 5+ years ...

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

#28

Post by ghaff »

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #19
knaekhoved wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you say "normally", do you mean "badly, with fsck"? ZFS is growing incredibly quickly in popularity, and the only reason it's not the dominant filesystem already is because A) it took linux a long time to add support, and only dedicated appliance vendors had the will and ability to move to freebsd and B) macos was going to switch to zfs in the late '00s, but they got scared off by oracle's legal shenanigans, whi…

> A) it took linux a long time to add support Linux has no support for ZFS. This is an out-of-tree patch set and therefor a no-go for most including myself. ZFS intentionally has a terrible license and is owned by Oracle. People are free to do what they want but I wish all the time wasted on it could have been put in something more interesting.

CDDL isn't an especially terrible license in isolation (it's basically Mozilla) but it is generally considered incompatible with GPL which, depending upon which set of 20 year old memories from ex-Sun employees you're inclined to believe, was more or less a deliberately nefarious state of affairs.

Oracle owns most/all of the copyrights and Canonical was willing to take a calculated risk after, presumably, some back-channel discussions. But those companies with something to actually lose from a lawsuit with Oracle or organizations with strong free software principles aren't going anywhere close. Oracle has had a long time to change the license if they actually cared to.

Personally, 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.

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

#29

Post by infogulch »

willis936 wrote: post #25
seized wrote: post #20

Boot environments are one of those magic features that when you've used it, it's hard to give up. My NAS has long been on OpenIndiana. Boot environments mean zero risk OS upgrades. At one point I could have gone back to a 4 year old OS version and booted it with no data loss. You can create one at any time, so it brings an even better take on VM snapshots to the physical machine world. Hacking on something and want a…

I've never used a boot environment. Is there a way to use a boot environment to have a ZFS-backed Windows install?

You may be interested in recent (~the last month) developments in adding Windows support to OpenZFS: https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/pull/14034

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

#30

Post by throw0101c »

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #19
knaekhoved wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you say "normally", do you mean "badly, with fsck"? ZFS is growing incredibly quickly in popularity, and the only reason it's not the dominant filesystem already is because A) it took linux a long time to add support, and only dedicated appliance vendors had the will and ability to move to freebsd and B) macos was going to switch to zfs in the late '00s, but they got scared off by oracle's legal shenanigans, whi…

> A) it took linux a long time to add support Linux has no support for ZFS. This is an out-of-tree patch set and therefor a no-go for most including myself. ZFS intentionally has a terrible license and is owned by Oracle. People are free to do what they want but I wish all the time wasted on it could have been put in something more interesting.

> ZFS intentionally has a terrible license

The folks on FreeBSD didn't / don't seem to think so. Neither does Apple (who pulled in DTrace, which has the exact same license).

> and is owned by Oracle.

The OpenZFS folks would don't seem to think so.

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