Ubuntu 19.10 Indeed Working On "Experimental ZFS Option" In Ubiquity Installer

[k1e0x]

It's actually now the opposite. ZOL (ZFS on linux) is used as baseline for ZFS on FreeBSD. https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/...er/027085.html

So ZFS is now better integrated on linux than BSD.

FreeBSD still uses it own. (13-RELEASE will be ZoL's ZFS hopefully) Unsure about FreeNAS as it's TrueOS based.. Probably uses the older code.

The change was done because it was too hard to have different features in different trees. (For example FreeBSD had trim and Linux had encryption, but there are other examples) Hopefully Windows and Mac ports also use ZoL.

I also believe FreeBSD doesn't use the Solaris Porting Layer (SPL) from Illumos. Since BSD is more similar to Solaris they used a lot of their own implementations. Linux will continue to use the SPL and it's been integrated into the ZFS module.

[phoenix_rizzen]

It's actually now the opposite. ZOL (ZFS on linux) is used as baseline for ZFS on FreeBSD. https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/...er/027085.html

So ZFS is now better integrated on linux than BSD.

Incorrect. ZFS is integrated directly into the FreeBSD OS (it's right there in the source tree under /usr/src), while it's an out-of-tree module that individual Linux distros have to manually keep working with every kernel change. It will always be "more integrated" in FreeBSD for that reason. For awhile, ZoL had more / different features than OpenZFS in FreeBSD, but that's going to change going forward (everyone should be more closely aligned).

FreeBSD from 7 through 12 (and possibly 13) pulled ZFS code directly from the OpenSolaris/Illumos repository that eventually became OpenZFS. All ZFS users pulled their code from the OpenZFS repo, and pushed their changes back upstream into OpenZFS for everyone else to pull from. However, over time, getting patches upstreamed into Illumos took too long, and the approval process became a major bottleneck, leading to each of the downstream repos diverging quite a bit (feature A is in FreeBSD, feature B is in Linux, feature C is in Illumos, feature 4 is in Delphix, etc). And, over time, the ZoL devs became more active than the Illumos devs, so new features were appearing in ZoL before Illumos.

So, the OpenZFS guys decided to rebase the OpenZFS repo on the ZoL repo. And bring all project repos into this one. So the plan is for the OpenZFS repo to have an OS-agnostic directory that everyone pulls from, and an OS-specific directory for each member OS. And everyone will pull from/push to that single OpenZFS repo.

Delphix and iX Systems have already switched to using the new ZoL-based OpenZFS repo for their ZFS support in their bleeding edge previews, and have started work on pushing their unique features (like TRIM) into the ZoL-based OpenZFS repo. FreeBSD has started work on integrating the new ZoL-based OpenZFS bits into FreeBSD-Current (aka 13-CURRENT). They may or may not switch to it in FreeBSD 13.0, depending on feature parity and stability. MacOS X port of OpenZFS is already using the ZoL-based repo. Windows port of OpenZFS is already using the ZoL-based repo (yes, there's a Windows port where each dataset can have a separate drive letter, or just be a directory).

IOW, all that's changing the layout of the OpenZFS repo that everyone will be using going forward, and how patches are merged into that repo.

[k1e0x]

The kernel doesn't really care if it's a module or built in once it's loaded (and on FreeBSD it's a boot loaded module as well, no difference than linux.. all that is different is where that module came from. From a package manager on Linux or from the base install on FreeBSD.)

integration is a funny word.. as far as support and programs that work with it and such, ZFS is far more integrated into FreeBSD than it is in Linux as it's been common root file system for a ton of users for what? a decade now? (UFS is the default) - Linux is just getting it's first major distro the ability to install on root from the default installer.

And.. no need to argue over specifics all this is great, one code base, new features from ZoL and BSD merged together and Linux is finally growing up over it's tantrum of NIH and license FUD and joining the modern filesystem world. (Hopefully at least they beat the ZFS port becoming stable on Windows.)

[phoenix_rizzen]

You can actually compile the ZFS bits direct into the FreeBSD kernel now, no modules required. Any tools developed around booting come with ZFS support (and boot environments added automatically to the loader menu, EFI booting support, yadda yadda). So yes, it's definitely more integrated into FreeBSD, contrary to the OP I was responding to.

It certainly would be funny if OpenZFS ended up working better on Windows than Linux. I was actually amazed they got it working, with drive letter support, even. Definitely alpha quality right now, but interesting nonetheless. Actually, it'd be even funnier if OpenZFS-on-Windows worked better for a home file server than Microsoft's home server (with Storage Spaces?) that they abandoned after 2 releases.

[k1e0x]

You can actually compile the ZFS bits direct into the FreeBSD kernel now, no modules required. Any tools developed around booting come with ZFS support (and boot environments added automatically to the loader menu, EFI booting support, yadda yadda). So yes, it's definitely more integrated into FreeBSD, contrary to the OP I was responding to.

It certainly would be funny if OpenZFS ended up working better on Windows than Linux. I was actually amazed they got it working, with drive letter support, even. Definitely alpha quality right now, but interesting nonetheless. Actually, it'd be even funnier if OpenZFS-on-Windows worked better for a home file server than Microsoft's home server (with Storage Spaces?) that they abandoned after 2 releases.

That would be funny.. Drive letters hmm.. cool.. Does it just blue screen or is the storage unstable. Not that I *want* to use Windows. lol I just want it to be able to read my ZFS formatted USB sticks. Oh and also if it does work, we wouldn't be stuck with BitLocker.

[phoenix_rizzen]

https://openzfsonosx.org/wiki/Windows

I don't think it supports encryption yet. But that would be useful feature. Cross-platform encrypted filesystem for USB/removable/portable storage. I haven't read too much of the ZoW pages, other than to see it works, so maybe it's buried in there somewhere.

I tried to convince $BOSS to migrate our FreeBSD/ZFS based storage servers over to Windows Server/ZFS, but he didn't seem too enthused about the idea ...

[skeevy420]

The kernel doesn't really care if it's a module or built in once it's loaded (and on FreeBSD it's a boot loaded module as well, no difference than linux.. all that is different is where that module came from. From a package manager on Linux or from the base install on FreeBSD.)

integration is a funny word.. as far as support and programs that work with it and such, ZFS is far more integrated into FreeBSD than it is in Linux as it's been common root file system for a ton of users for what? a decade now? (UFS is the default) - Linux is just getting it's first major distro the ability to install on root from the default installer.

And.. no need to argue over specifics all this is great, one code base, new features from ZoL and BSD merged together and Linux is finally growing up over it's tantrum of NIH and license FUD and joining the modern filesystem world. (Hopefully at least they beat the ZFS port becoming stable on Windows.)

Antergos, maybe Manjaro, allowed ZFS root installs before Ubuntu...it just wasn't very advertised and users needed to run the installer from the command line to enable experimental features. Every time I installed Antergos from three years ago to this year it was to a ZFS root and it wasn't until February of this year that I switched to Manjaro with a BTRFS root.

I didn't bother checking if Manjaro's installer had ZFS options hidden anywhere because I was wanting to try out BTRFS and see if it seemed any faster...didn't benchmark anything but I can't tell the difference between the two when doing day-to-day stuff like watching movies, compiling software, playing games, etc from my spinning disks.

I'm hoping that EndeavourOS will have the ZFS on Root installer options since they're Antergos' successor. Only 12 more days.

[skeevy420]

https://openzfsonosx.org/wiki/Windows

I don't think it supports encryption yet. But that would be useful feature. Cross-platform encrypted filesystem for USB/removable/portable storage. I haven't read too much of the ZoW pages, other than to see it works, so maybe it's buried in there somewhere.

I tried to convince $BOSS to migrate our FreeBSD/ZFS based storage servers over to Windows Server/ZFS, but he didn't seem too enthused about the idea ...

The latest release has "Bring repo up to date with ZOL 0.8" in their release notes. I don't know if that means encryption works or not, but ZOL 0.8 is when encryption was first available for Linux users (outside of using out-of-tree builds of course).

[k1e0x]

Antergos, maybe Manjaro, allowed ZFS root installs before Ubuntu...it just wasn't very advertised and users needed to run the installer from the command line to enable experimental features. Every time I installed Antergos from three years ago to this year it was to a ZFS root and it wasn't until February of this year that I switched to Manjaro with a BTRFS root.

I didn't bother checking if Manjaro's installer had ZFS options hidden anywhere because I was wanting to try out BTRFS and see if it seemed any faster...didn't benchmark anything but I can't tell the difference between the two when doing day-to-day stuff like watching movies, compiling software, playing games, etc from my spinning disks.

I'm hoping that EndeavourOS will have the ZFS on Root installer options since they're Antergos' successor. Only 12 more days.

Yeah, I've run it on Funtoo (Gentoo without systemd) for years, maybe even soon after ZoL started.. (and used Fuse before that) Well.. I did at least till I gave up on Linux entirely.. none of my systems are Linux anymore. (Too frustrating to get the way I want it.. So I have several FreeBSD workstations, a Mac and a Windows system now) - I hacked it on to SuSE and other distros as well in the past. The 1-click install on a major distro from it's gui is important to help regular people get into it. Hopefully Ubuntu adds boot environments for seamless update rollbacks and maybe a time-slider like interface to the file manager too so a user can say "what did this folder look like a day ago, a week ago etc" within a easy gui.. I'd love to see that in Gnome and KDE. And the tools are there, Sun had this in the JDE based on Gnome 2 + ZFS.

You may want to try (as I mentioned earlier) to set vm.swappiness=1 (5 and 10 are ok too)
It prevents Linux swapping down to disk when the ZFS ARC fills up.. something I noticed after several days of uptime.. it improves performance a lot if you leave your system running and lets the ARC work better.

[Dr.N0]

https://openzfsonosx.org/wiki/Windows

I don't think it supports encryption yet. But that would be useful feature. Cross-platform encrypted filesystem for USB/removable/portable storage. I haven't read too much of the ZoW pages, other than to see it works, so maybe it's buried in there somewhere.

I tried to convince $BOSS to migrate our FreeBSD/ZFS based storage servers over to Windows Server/ZFS, but he didn't seem too enthused about the idea ...

The latest release has "Bring repo up to date with ZOL 0.8" in their release notes. I don't know if that means encryption works or not, but ZOL 0.8 is when encryption was first available for Linux users (outside of using out-of-tree builds of course).

Encryption seems to be working. They are now trying to enable hardware acceleration for it: https://github.com/openzfsonwindows/ZFSin/issues/110.