The Good & Bad Of ZFS + HAMMER File-Systems On BSD

[TeamBlackFox]

What if I don't ever want it to be alongside Windows and OS X. When an OS becomes "mainstream" many things happen - the interface is dumbed down for the idiots who don't take the time to learn how to use a computer properly, performance is sidelined for eye candy, documentation suffers, complexity increases - for those reasons I prefer for my OS of choice to have a limited market. Don't get me wrong - I'm not going to stick with FreeBSD if it adopts some monstrosity akin to systemd or launchd. I'll move to OpenBSD, NetBSD, or perhaps go total eccentric to Plan 9. The problem with GNU/Linux is that it ultimately has been commercialised - and positioned as a drop in alternative to Windows or OS X. I don't want a complex system, I prefer minimalism. I stopped using Arch when they cut out initscripts, so I use Void on ARM currently and thats the only Linux I use right now. I've used Slackware, but thats too barebones for me. But hey, some people like that. Cannibalising the older distros isn't a good sign.

[TeamBlackFox]

Well, now that someone's brought up Gentoo, I figured I'd chime in with my thoughts there:

Gentoo and other (especially source based) "choose your own adventure" distros are valuable because they get people exposed to the OS internals in a wide ranging, general sense. People that use it feel all the design fuckups and oversights that happen, and while it's annoying to have to deal with those problems, it's valuable for the software ecosystem for them to be seen and dealt with.

That is, more people get a better sense for how much and what kind of stuff is going on behind the scenes, which is good experience for developers and distro integrators to have, and it causes a lot of integration level bugs to get fixed upstream because there are more users performing these tasks. It also serves as an easy to use testbed/platform for bleeding edge development.

I think if gentoo and distros like it suddenly weren't around, a lot of other distros would get measurably worse in short order.

I can concur with much of what you say here. The BSDs are kind of on the level of Gentoo in complexity, but somewhat better documented and you don't have to build a kernel from source. Indeed, they're valuable to the community.

[mercutio]

They both suck and are in no way represent the future of file systems. Want to see the future of file systems? Look at btrfs and ext4 (especially btrfs).

I hate the term, but I really don't think btrfs is "production ready" yet.

I get things like:
[220831.896802] BTRFS info (device md0): csum failed ino 3123368 off 53248 csum 3482155253 expected csum 0

Weird thing is, I've had those kinds of issues on multiple systems. And it's just the base OS. The rest is zfs

I've maded the shift to ext4 for root on most systems. mdadm is not nearly as nice as zfs though.

[TeamBlackFox]

ext4 is an abortion - use XFS or JFS. So much more KISS on Linux. Or F2FS on SSD/Flash media. Pick your poison, but don't for hell's sake use ext4.

[WizardGed]

Here we go again

better performance, the ports system, fine control over every aspect of the system and the more insular to the UNIX lineage. Soft updates on UFS are what I use on my laptop though, vs ZFS, primarily because ZFS, BTRFS and HAMMER have less advantages on single disk systems.

I'm glad you've found better performance on your BSD of choice. I have never found any meaningful difference in performance once both systems were configured correctly. The only thing of note was that Networking was a little bit more simple to set up and required less effort to set up as i wished (on FreeBSD and NetBSD at least i havent used any of the others) while Linux was far easier to administer and adjust to meet my needs. I stayed on Linux due to the lack of what i felt were mandatory features in a Modern OS. If all i required was an easy to set up networking server or load balancer I'd look at the BSD's in more detail but the lack of documentation (and yes the attitude towards anyone who uses Linux for things that "can be done on *BSD" and the overall demeaning tone towards Linux / Licenses theirn).

The very reason I used to use Linux as a main OS was because the idea that everyone can do their own thing - different window manager, package management, init system, everyone can control almost every aspect of the OS in the fine way. First, HAL, then udev, then D-BUS, then systemd drove me away. Its a Microsoft software model. And no, its not like BSD because BSD has a MINIMAL base system. rc init may be 20+ years old, but it works. If you're all about advancement though, you'd not even use Linux, no, if we're about the latest and greatest, Plan 9 from Bell Labs or GNU Hurd would be the most applicable, or Haiku OS, or AROS. Seriously - until you control every aspect of the system, you cannot shoot down Slackware, Gentoo, Void or any of those. They're amazing, and systemd shouldn't coerce them into cannibalism.

This is by far the most off base and misinformed statement I've seen in a while. you can use any DE you like, any init system you like and any other program you like but the fact of life is these programs come with dependancies the developer has chosen to depend on for features, reduction of duplicate code, increased performance etc. etc. in other words the developer chooses what needs what. some developers that were working on a crap ton of projects decided they were going to try to consolidate their effort into a single product that would give them some tangible benefits (I'm not going into them to avoid nitpicking from people that just want to argue about something other than the argument itself). as they had a majority of people the software became tightly intertwined and to save effort some code was removed due to redundancy with code that would be integrated into their project. so they did so and incremented to a new version stating if others wanted to fork and continue using the old code they certainly should be able to create it themselves or pay someone else to if many people want that or they could create shims or middleware to support other software that depended on that code. as was their right. now we have people saying NO you have to run your software my way. when the systemd group simply said no we don't have to do whatever we're told the others forked some of it and tried to badmouth the guys that just want to fix some problems they saw in the old software instead of doing something meaningful and attempting to address the perceived problems. Your Idea that its good that an OS/Kernel is minimal is ridiculous. how minimal an OS/Kernel plays no actual role into how useful or "good it is" for many today the difference in size your talking about is nearly laughable for most users. The statement that Linux is not advanced enough is a value statement and is based on what you think is important. To put it simply there is next to nothing that any BSD does that Linux can not due at the moment and likewise there are only a few things Linux can do that BSD cannot yet. pointing at other OS's and saying that these are so called advanced OS's is laughable (I particularly enjoy 2 of your OS's on that list). Finally No one has forced any Distro to do anything and no one has "tempted anyone" much less cannibalized

[WizardGed]

Best argument I've ever heard.

ext4 is an abortion - use XFS or JFS. So much more KISS on Linux. Or F2FS on SSD/Flash media. Pick your poison, but don't for hell's sake use ext4.

Just out of curiosity how is ext4 an abortion and XFS (or I'd love to here how you could argue JFS) is not. Any actual technical merit based points would be appreciated. (I won't even comment on somone espousing F2FS on SSD's at this point).

[Ibidem]

If the price of replacing walled-garden OSs is becoming one, I'm happier running a minor OS.
It's hard to find new soil in a walled garden.
Now, I'm not saying that I prefer a minor OS as such. If the biggest OS around is an open environment (in terms of code coming and going), it might well be worth using.

For what it's worth, I haven't yet encountered anything I want to run that needs systemd.
And writing init scripts from scratch is fun, in my book.

Still, I'm pleased that some of my code will be used in the next Android version:

https://android.googlesource.com/platform/external/toybox/+/9250c95a8c471981e2ba1aedb401a75f42e1293b/toys/other/acpi.c

Ironically, those who complain about the differences between Linux-based distros seem to not be backing the userland software that's going into Android despite holding it up as an example.

[WizardGed]

better performance, the ports system, fine control over every aspect of the system and the more insular to the UNIX lineage. Soft updates on UFS are what I use on my laptop though, vs ZFS, primarily because ZFS, BTRFS and HAMMER have less advantages on single disk systems.

I'm glad you've found better performance on your BSD of choice. I have never found any meaningful difference in performance once both systems were configured correctly. The only thing of note was that Networking was a little bit more simple to set up and required less effort to set up as i wished (on FreeBSD and NetBSD at least i havent used any of the others) while Linux was far easier to administer and adjust to meet my needs. I stayed on Linux due to the lack of what i felt were mandatory features in a Modern OS. If all i required was an easy to set up networking server or load balancer I'd look at the BSD's in more detail but the lack of documentation (and yes the attitude towards anyone who uses Linux for things that "can be done on *BSD" and the overall demeaning tone towards Linux / Licenses theirn).

The very reason I used to use Linux as a main OS was because the idea that everyone can do their own thing - different window manager, package management, init system, everyone can control almost every aspect of the OS in the fine way. First, HAL, then udev, then D-BUS, then systemd drove me away. Its a Microsoft software model. And no, its not like BSD because BSD has a MINIMAL base system. rc init may be 20+ years old, but it works. If you're all about advancement though, you'd not even use Linux, no, if we're about the latest and greatest, Plan 9 from Bell Labs or GNU Hurd would be the most applicable, or Haiku OS, or AROS. Seriously - until you control every aspect of the system, you cannot shoot down Slackware, Gentoo, Void or any of those. They're amazing, and systemd shouldn't coerce them into cannibalism.

This is by far the most off base and misinformed statement I've seen in a while. you can use any DE you like, any init system you like and any other program you like but the fact of life is these programs come with dependancies the developer has chosen to depend on for features, reduction of duplicate code, increased performance etc. etc. in other words the developer chooses what needs what. some developers that were working on a crap ton of projects decided they were going to try to consolidate their effort into a single product that would give them some tangible benefits (I'm not going into them to avoid nitpicking from people that just want to argue about something other than the argument itself). as they had a majority of people the software became tightly intertwined and to save effort some code was removed due to redundancy with code that would be integrated into their project. so they did so and incremented to a new version stating if others wanted to fork and continue using the old code they certainly should be able to create it themselves or pay someone else to if many people want that or they could create shims or middleware to support other software that depended on that code. as was their right. now we have people saying NO you have to run your software my way. when the systemd group simply said no we don't have to do whatever we're told the others forked some of it and tried to badmouth the guys that just want to fix some problems they saw in the old software instead of doing something meaningful and attempting to address the perceived problems. Your Idea that its good that an OS/Kernel is minimal is ridiculous. how minimal an OS/Kernel plays no actual role into how useful or "good it is" for many today the difference in size your talking about is nearly laughable for most users. The statement that Linux is not advanced enough is a value statement and is based on what you think is important. To put it simply there is next to nothing that any BSD does that Linux can not due at the moment and likewise there are only a few things Linux can do that BSD cannot yet. pointing at other OS's and saying that these are so called advanced OS's is laughable (I particularly enjoy 2 of your OS's on that list). Finally No one has forced any Distro to do anything and no one has "tempted anyone" much less cannibalized

[caligula]

I hate the term, but I really don't think btrfs is "production ready" yet.

I get things like:
[220831.896802] BTRFS info (device md0): csum failed ino 3123368 off 53248 csum 3482155253 expected csum 0

Weird thing is, I've had those kinds of issues on multiple systems. And it's just the base OS. The rest is zfs

I've maded the shift to ext4 for root on most systems. mdadm is not nearly as nice as zfs though.

It's insane to trust BTRFS right now with critical data. Sure it has fancy features and fast development model, but in phoronix benchmarks it often loses to ext4 in speed and no offense but I don't see it anywhere near the state ZFS was years ago.

[johnc]

Want to see the future of file systems? Look at btrfs and ext4 (especially btrfs).

Have you ever noticed how BTRFS is always the future of file systems...? Never the present...?

It's coming soon!

No, seriously!