Canonical Confirms Their Experimental ZFS Plans For The Ubuntu 19.10 Desktop

[mskarbek]

I'll be the first to push for ZoL in Fedora if someone ever implements the FUSE backend for it...

FUSE-based implementation has limited usability.

[starshipeleven]

Both ZFS and btrfs will work fine if properly maintained (with the plethora of caveats that both filesystems have properly documented). I think btrfs got a lot of bad publicity because distributions made it extremely easy to install and people were installing it unaware that it needs maintenance.

Distros that actually care about btrfs (like OpenSUSE) do have services to do this maintenance automatically https://github.com/kdave/btrfsmaintenance

[starshipeleven]

For me the btrfs showstopper was how bad it deals with file fragmentation.

All CoW filesystems will have tons of fragmentation on databases and VM disks, that's cause by how CoW works (never edit the file in place, any change goes in a new "fragment").

Only way to deal with that is to run defragmentation actively, either with userspace tools run on a schedule or with btrfs mount option "autodefrag", and probably something similar for ZFS.

[Chugworth]

All CoW filesystems will have tons of fragmentation on databases and VM disks, that's cause by how CoW works (never edit the file in place, any change goes in a new "fragment").

Only way to deal with that is to run defragmentation actively, either with userspace tools run on a schedule or with btrfs mount option "autodefrag", and probably something similar for ZFS.

ZFS doesn't have any defrag. It just accepts that fragmentation is a fact of life and deals with it by using block-level caching (ARC) for frequently accessed data.

[starshipeleven]

ZFS doesn't have any defrag. It just accepts that fragmentation is a fact of life and deals with it by using block-level caching (ARC) for frequently accessed data.

That's kind of bs approach. ZFS does have issues with high fragmentation situations too, when used with databases and snapshots. Once it reaches 70%-ish or so performance goes to hell.
It's worth noting that it's issue is mainly with free space fragmentation more than file fragmentation, but at the end of the day it does not matter much.

There are "tools" to defrag that are basically just making a snapshot and sending it over to another system and pulling it back to fix the fragmentation, https://github.com/salesforce/zfs_defrag

[aht0]

I understand why someone would want to have ZFS on their servers, especially when there's a need for RAID5/6 configurations where btrfs still sucks.
But on desktop? How many people are using RAID5 or RAID-Z on desktop machines?

So what's the benefit of running ZFS on desktops -- e.g. compared to (if someone really wants volumes snapshotting CRC checks) btrfs? ZFS apparently makes it hard to remove volumes, uses tons of memory when deduplication is enabled, etc (not saying that ZFS is bad, just that each shine in slightly different use-cases).

Hm. I am currently using Raid-z1 (rember ZFS Raids are not exactly like traditional Raid setups and are not using quite same principles. 'Raid-Z1' is closest by concept to Raid-5 tho).

Reason: Had handful of unused mech drives and bunch of free SATA slots. It's faster than using single mech drive, and when one fails, I'll replace it with next spare drive which would otherwise sit unused in some cabinet. Energy use? Who cares, it's minuscule. When I am in Windows these drives are shut down by power management. Get to use away old drives, without having to buy new ones and there's some failure-protection inherent to it.

[skeevy420]

ZFS? Not interested. IIUC it is a fork and out of alignment with current day ZFS, and the idea of using a bastardized filesystem made for another OS natively on Linux with all these hoops to jump through -- I'm sure it's great if you use it at work but if not it sounds like a lot of extra work with minimal benefits for the features I need.

Plus, Fuck Oracle and their IP.

I have a Fuck Them attitude toward Oracle and Adobe, they are in the corporate money business, not the software innovation business. I hope they loose ground as they have both caused so much unrest and problems for Linux that never needed to happen over the last few decades.

What a retarded position. Just because I hate Facebook with a passion doesn't mean that I won't use ZSTD. I prefer to use things that work good.

The only extra hoops there are is the fact that is has to be manually setup because not one single distribution has a comprehensive ZFS installer; obviously not including the simplistic ZFS on Root installers that suffer from the exact same issues that most BTRFS installers have -- neither make good use of their advanced features; SUSE does has an awesome BTRFS installer worth mentioning.