ZFS/Zsys Code Seeing Important Performance Fix Ahead Of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

One of the new features to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS for those making use of ZFS On Linux with Canonical's Zsys manager is the automated APT snapshots on package transactions to be able to carry out system rollbacks if needed. An important fix around this functionality is on the way.

Didier Roche of Canonical continues working a lot on Zsys and in the past few days he has worked out a major performance improvement in the dataset code. Loading of the GRUB boot-loader menu where existing ZFS snapshots can be selected could take upwards of 80 seconds for listing 100 system snapshots. But now with this latest Zsys code being prepared, GRUB is back to being near instantaneous.

Seeing as the APT snapshots are automated when running on ZoL/Zsys, for many users it would just be a matter of time before they amass a large number of snapshots. So thankfully this performance issue was sorted out ahead of the release, which is expected to happen next week... Having to potentially wait a minute or more for dealing with the GRUB menu could have been painful.

This work and other last minute Zsys activity is outlined via this Discourse post.

The Zsys/ZoL desktop support with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS has come together nicely as an experimental option while EXT4 remains the default file-system. The desktop integration is nicely done though one element that had been talked about in the past was rewriting the Ubuntu desktop installer but that has yet to materialize.