Canonical Developers Preparing For More ZFS Improvements In Ubuntu 20.10

[DanL]

As predicted. Canonical has now boosted their GNOME development

As predicted, 144Hz is full of shit and and can't make relevant comments to save his/her life.

[DanL]

enjoy a great read from Canonical’s desktop team

How about you STFU? I don't care about GNOME. I'm not a fan at all. And even GNOME fans probably don't want your irrelevant GNOME spam/"comments" dragging down the SNR in a topic about filesystems...

[starshipeleven]

DanL Calm down and enjoy a great read from Canonical’s desktop team
https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/gnome...tu-20-04/15972

Seriously, why you need to post about the Standard Linux Desktop in a thread about ZFS?

[starshipeleven]

Why the hell they don't focus on BTRFS?

And compete with actual professionals like SUSE, and with big fish with a ton of suit-types like Oracle and their "Unbreakable RHEL clone with btrfs support".

How many are offering a decent ZFS-based Linux distro?

[thedarb]

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 used these instructions to install with full native ZFS encryption, and it worked like a charm. Here you go:

https://linsomniac.gitlab.io/post/2020-04-09-ubuntu-2004-encrypted-zfs/

So it supports it, even nicely asks for the passphrase at boot. Be sure to include with the
encryption=aes-256-gcm option from the instructions, as aes-256-gcm is getting some big speed improvements in the upcoming ZFS 0.8.4 release.

[k1e0x]

Keeping system snapshots is a very handy feature, and neither Btrfs or ZFS should have the snapshot performance impact of LVM. Both filesystems were designed from the ground up with CoW support. In fact, I would expect the performance of LVM to be as bad or worse than Btrfs when it comes to keeping snapshots of VMs. In that case, ZFS would be the best choice due to the way it caches data, and also for its ZVOL feature. But you would really need a lot of memory for it to work ideally.

ZFS doesn't per-say need a lot of ram to function, it uses ram in it's ARC cache for performance. More ram is more performance, less ram is less performance. The value it set to a percentage of system ram on boot and it will free it if the system comes under memory pressure, although you can also set limits if you like.

On Linux I've noticed setting vm.swappiness=1 seems to make things a little more smooth under memory pressure. Especially if you have swap on a ZVOL. That is just my own observations tho, I haven't seen that recommended anywhere. ZFS also has no snapshot performance penalty, it takes them instantly and has no real limit on the number you can have. You can snapshot a system every 15 minutes and keep them for a year if you want without a problem. (although snapshot operations, such as listing them will slow down if you have upwards of a few thousand)

As far as what one is better? It doesn't matter if you like Btrfs or what you really use on your home computer or even what people on this forum believe. Enterprises will adopt it and use the filesystem they feel has the best integrity and track record. /shrug

[k1e0x]

I used these instructions to install with full native ZFS encryption, and it worked like a charm. Here you go:

https://linsomniac.gitlab.io/post/2020-04-09-ubuntu-2004-encrypted-zfs/

So it supports it, even nicely asks for the passphrase at boot. Be sure to include with the
encryption=aes-256-gcm option from the instructions, as aes-256-gcm is getting some big speed improvements in the upcoming ZFS 0.8.4 release.

That is cool, I setup a 19.10 system a while back and just hacked plymouth to do the passphrase but this looks simpler. ZFS encryption is pretty slick being that it's dataset (folder) based and can send them to remote without sending the key.

[tildearrow]

DanL Calm down and enjoy a great read from Canonical’s desktop team
https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/gnome...tu-20-04/15972

Stop trying to dominate us with psychological tricks like being a soft power and get back on-topic. This is about ZFS!!!

[aht0]

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'd guess it's a question of trust. When larger enterprises have given up on it, smaller ones are increasingly inclined to follow that pattern. They simply lack comparable support option, thus they'd prefer to leech off of larger enterprises supporting their tech solutions.
BTRFS vs BCacheFS? Former has had tons and tons of more work and developer effort put into it, they are not even comparable. But it also serves as an example about the nature of non-commercial Linux users. Some new "thing" would always feel more fashionable.