Ubuntu 19.10 Makes It So Easy To Have Your Desktop Running Off A ZFS File-System

[dremon_nl]

Can you enable built-in encryption in ZFS during installation? How does it play with boot loader?

[stormcrow]

To humbly disagree: that's where you're wrong. Simply look at OSX and Windows 7+ features in regards to rollback, snapshots, backup options, etc. The current Linux methods for doing that involve BTRFS and snapshots or File System over LVM+LUKS or LUKS+LVM with a custom rolled backup strategy. ZFS offers all of that under one toolkit versus the two/three or more toolkits needed without ZFS.

Simply put, desktop users like simplicity and ZFS offers that in the form of a single solution that covers all file system needs.

He's not wrong. He's talking about the average desktop user who can barely turn on a computer and panics if their icon for the web browser disappears from their desktop. They don't know how to use Windows roll back features. They may know how to make backups but don't hold your breath, and may not even realize they need a backup till they lose something in a hardware failure. These people wouldn't be using Linux let alone know what you're talking about. The average Apple user is no better at this. Even the average Linux desktop (non-developer) user would probably be hard pressed to deliver a coherent reason why they need a very highly advanced storage subsystem like ZFS. It's got great features, don't get me wrong, but most of them are aimed at scenarios that better fit data centers and professional developers and very large difficult to handle (such as backups because of data size) data sets than typical desktop use like word processing, spreadsheets, web browsing, and games while keeping the important stuff backed up on simple external storage media.

As a technician, it would be great to have people routinely populate their restore points and such, but that just doesn't happen in practice.


Edit to add: Don't mistake your personal use patterns for average use patterns. Ask a help desk or on site Dell/HP/Lenovo technician what the actual average desktop/laptop computer user is like. It will blow your mind how uninformed the average computer user is.

[stormcrow]

oops double post on edit! BAD ME!

[skeevy420]

Edit to add: Don't mistake your personal use patterns for average use patterns. Ask a help desk or on site Dell/HP/Lenovo technician what the actual average desktop/laptop computer user is like. It will blow your mind how uninformed the average computer user is.

Oh I know. My Dad never figured out the difference between right and left click and after 30 minutes of trying to help him he threw the mouse out of frustration.

That was back on Windows 98 and he hasn't used a computer ever since. I really don't get how hard these instructions were:

"When I say the word click, the button on the left side under your index finger is what you press. So click where it says 'start'."

*right clicks*

"No, the other one on the left side"

*left clicks*

"So move the mouse to where it says 'Programs'"

"Now click on 'Internet Explorer'"

*right clicks*

And that was an endless loop for 30 minutes with little tidbits of "but what is the right one for?"

"To bring up advanced context menus"

"But if I want to click the start menu, shouldn't I right click to bring up the menu?"

"No, that's a regular menu and you left click something to do its primary function. You only need to focus on the left click for now. You don't need to use the right click for anything yet. Pretend the right click doesn't even exist for the time being. We'll get to that later. Let's just focus on the basics."

"So click on the start menu"

*right clicks*

in my head -- "Dammit, Dad. I'm starting to think you're retarded."

[skeevy420]

So, like, if you get an unapproved post, don't copy/paste it into an approved post. You have two unapproved posts.

phoronix

Can one be approved and the other deleted?

[itoffshore]

When it comes to ZFS, I like the snapshot functionality but cannot justify the RAM requirements for my development workstation.

if you do not use deduplication the RAM requirements for zfs are minimal (1GB is fine - in FreeBSD the minimum for zfs is 512mb)

I've been running zfs for a year with native AES-GCM encryption (if you do not need deduplication it's faster than the default AES-CBC)

[edwaleni]

He's not wrong. He's talking about the average desktop user who can barely turn on a computer and panics if their icon for the web browser disappears from their desktop. They don't know how to use Windows roll back features. They may know how to make backups but don't hold your breath, and may not even realize they need a backup till they lose something in a hardware failure. These people wouldn't be using Linux let alone know what you're talking about. The average Apple user is no better at this. Even the average Linux desktop (non-developer) user would probably be hard pressed to deliver a coherent reason why they need a very highly advanced storage subsystem like ZFS. It's got great features, don't get me wrong, but most of them are aimed at scenarios that better fit data centers and professional developers and very large difficult to handle (such as backups because of data size) data sets than typical desktop use like word processing, spreadsheets, web browsing, and games while keeping the important stuff backed up on simple external storage media.

As a technician, it would be great to have people routinely populate their restore points and such, but that just doesn't happen in practice.


Edit to add: Don't mistake your personal use patterns for average use patterns. Ask a help desk or on site Dell/HP/Lenovo technician what the actual average desktop/laptop computer user is like. It will blow your mind how uninformed the average computer user is.

Yes, I have asked many friends who have worked tech help desks to write a book on their support experiences. My eye opener was probably when a friend worked the Microsoft Help Desk for DOS 3.3/Windows 2.03 back in 1988. It was the first time I had heard the remark, "DOS ain't done till Lotus won't run".

[coder]

as an average developer / data scientist can anyone please summarize why or why not worth it for me to reformat into zfs

Yeah, a pro-con comparison vs. BTRFS & your other favorite FSs would be appreciated.

I'm using BTRFS with snapshots, and it working fine. Except for occasional CPU usage spikes - those are annoying but I think have gotten shorter & less frequent.

On specific occasions, I've noted XFS still wins in terms of performance & functionality. I recently noticed BTRFS still doesn't support fallocate(), for instance.

[mb_q]

So, like, Btrfs is obviously an untested, unstable bit-black-hole and so the rock-solid alternative is an out-of-tree, foreign file system wrapped in an ad hoc abstraction layer...

[fuzz]

So, like, Btrfs is obviously an untested, unstable bit-black-hole

Untested and unstable? I've been using it with RAID 1 for years...

Recently been using it with online dedup. https://github.com/Zygo/bees/