Canonical Developers Preparing For More ZFS Improvements In Ubuntu 20.10

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Canonical Developers Preparing For More ZFS Improvements In Ubuntu 20.10

While Ubuntu 20.04 LTS was released less than two weeks ago, attention by Canonical and the Ubuntu development community has already turned to Ubuntu 20.10 as the Groovy Gorilla. With it being the first release past an LTS debut, they tend to be a more liberal in the changes in allowing plenty of time to stabilize before the next Long Term Support cycle. On the ZFS front it looks like we could be in for some more exciting changes...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ubuntu-20.10-More-ZFS

[andyprough]

20.04 got a very bad review at DW. Barely ran at all for Jesse, very slow when it did manage to run, and no ZFS snapshots at grub to help roll back any of the problems.

[Mario Junior]

Why the hell they don't focus on BTRFS?

[kylew77]

Would love to see a ZFS on root setup as easy as the FreeBSD installer makes it. Just about anyone smart enough to install an OS can install an encrypted ZFS with Raid 1 or 0 if they want it just using the FreeBSD installer. NetBSD 10 might have ZFS on root bootable too. Coupled with the Illuminos distros that and assuming Ubuntu gets its stuff in order that will be four easy to roll out ZFS on root OSes.

[mike456]

The Arstechnica review was fine:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/05/ubuntu-20-04-welcome-to-the-future-linux-lts-disciples/

Anyway as long as ZFS wants the whole disk I cannot use it.

[Pajn]

Why the hell they don't focus on BTRFS?

Everyone have basically given up on BTRFS for desktop distros. While Canonical went with ZFS, Red Hat is trying to develop similar features over XFS instead.

Hopefully BcacheFS can eventually deliver a good CoW FS to linux but till then everyone just have to make do with what came before.

[Britoid]

Everyone have basically given up on BTRFS for desktop distros. While Canonical went with ZFS, Red Hat is trying to develop similar features over XFS instead.

Hopefully BcacheFS can eventually deliver a good CoW FS to linux but till then everyone just have to make do with what came before.

There's actually talk now of Fedora Workstation possibily defaulting to btrfs.

[NotMine999]

Yeah, Canonical need to make better scripts to inflate those clicks per week counts. That seem to matter much to the distro hopper crowd. One of the “let’s reskin other people’s work and come up with a stupid name” distributions posted their script on the forums. Canonical should pick that up and run a light DDOS on distrowatch! Keep trucking! /s

You know the world is really messed up when I agree with a post by 144Hz

[Chugworth]

Well I hope that by 20.10, Ubuntu will add the ability to enable ZFS encryption on the root partition. And of course, add the ZFS option for server installs! I was hoping to reinstall my home Ubuntu storage server with a ZFS root, but nope, no ZFS option in the place where you would expect to see it most.

Everyone have basically given up on BTRFS for desktop distros. While Canonical went with ZFS, Red Hat is trying to develop similar features over XFS instead.

Hopefully BcacheFS can eventually deliver a good CoW FS to linux but till then everyone just have to make do with what came before.

I run Btrfs as the root filesystem on all of my Linux desktops, and I'd say it's a really solid filesystem as long as you know how to use it. The biggest problem I see when it comes to giving it to "average users" is that it's kind of squirrley when calculating free space. You could end up in a situation where it tells you that you have no free space left when you should have multiple gigabytes, and you have to run a balance to correct that. Then sometimes a full balance might not complete and you have to run it several times separately for the different types of chunks.

With that said, ZFS has its own quirk related to free space. I wonder how many "average users" would be aware of the rule that you should never let it reach 90% usage or you risk getting into a situation where the performance of that pool is permanently degraded.

[CochainComplex]

Well I hope that by 20.10, Ubuntu will add the ability to enable ZFS encryption on the root partition. And of course, add the ZFS option for server installs! I was hoping to reinstall my home Ubuntu storage server with a ZFS root, but nope, no ZFS option in the place where you would expect to see it most.


I run Btrfs as the root filesystem on all of my Linux desktops, and I'd say it's a really solid filesystem as long as you know how to use it. The biggest problem I see when it comes to giving it to "average users" is that it's kind of squirrley when calculating free space. You could end up in a situation where it tells you that you have no free space left when you should have multiple gigabytes, and you have to run a balance to correct that. Then sometimes a full balance might not complete and you have to run it several times separately for the different types of chunks.

With that said, ZFS has its own quirk related to free space. I wonder how many "average users" would be aware of the rule that you should never let it reach 90% usage or you risk getting into a situation where the performance of that pool is permanently degraded.

But I would assume that the average user doesn't care and will just use ext4. If you need ZFS or Btrfs or you want to use it, then it is rather likely that there is some knowledge above average already existing.