Ubuntu's Zsys For OpenZFS Linux Installs Sees First Update In A Year

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  • Developer12
    Senior Member
    • Dec 2019
    • 1574

    #11
    Originally posted by pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx View Post

    And yet 2/3 of the big enterprise backed desktop offerings are using it by default, one of them for many years. I have doubts about RAID 5/6 ever being fixed, but the rest comes across as fear mongering. And this is coming from someone who uses ZFS for bulk storage.
    Let's not forget RHEL backtracked hard on BTRFS and according to the lead they're not planning to use it for any enterprise products.

    Comment

    • mether
      Fedora Contributor
      • Oct 2009
      • 2517

      #12
      Originally posted by skeevy420 View Post

      Let's agree to disagree here. Valve' Steamdeck has a dual BTRFS/Ext4 setup because BTRFS doesn't handle their use-case just fine. ZFS, oddly enough, would have.
      What use case is that? Many devices use this combo because they don't need any of the more advanced features in COW based filesystems in select situations and instead just want the raw better performance that COW based fs will not give you.You can totally switch if you want to https://github.com/Trevo525/btrfdeck

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      • h**2
        Junior Member
        • Jun 2011
        • 23

        #13
        Zsys is more or less dead in the water:

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        • intelfx
          Senior Member
          • Jun 2018
          • 1126

          #14
          Originally posted by Developer12 View Post

          Far too buggy.

          Propensity to eat the whole filesystem when there's a disk media error in the right spot, spiral-of-doom freespace pathologies when more than half the disk is full, and then the forever-broken raid implementation that the devs outright warn against using. The list goes on.

          BTRFS has been perpetually unfinished for over 10 years now and I doubt it will ever get across the finish line. Honestly, nobody should be using it in it's truthfully-developmental state.
          Ah yeah, there goes our regular installment of anti-btrfs FUD. Go on... *yawn*

          Comment

          • pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx
            Senior Member
            • Jul 2020
            • 1575

            #15
            Originally posted by Developer12 View Post

            Let's not forget RHEL backtracked hard on BTRFS and according to the lead they're not planning to use it for any enterprise products.
            That doesn't really contradict anything I said though. The big 3 of enterprise backed desktop offerings...
            • Ubuntu: ext4 with an option for ZFS (which as of 22.04 isn't labeled as experimental anymore)
            • Fedora: Btrfs (with a big interest in it after RH had already gone the Stratis route)
            • OpenSUSE: Btrfs
            The doom and gloom "far too buggy" isn't a realistic take on things with both Fedora and OpenSUSE using it by default. Their user bases are simply far too big to do so with any kind of common / widespread data issues.

            Red Hat is the 800 lb gorilla in the enterprise space, and there is some obvious value (and monetary) add in going their own way with Stratis. If they can offer enterprise storage features (space efficient RAID levels / pooling / tiering / send|receive / etc.) with no out of tree modules with a good API that is slickly integrated into Cockpit, there is some good upside for them. As desktop users we'd probably be better off if they invested in getting Btrfs to that point, but from the outside looking in it's hard to say if they didn't because they didn't believe it was possible, or they saw an opportunity for differentiation and dollars.

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            • Developer12
              Senior Member
              • Dec 2019
              • 1574

              #16
              This article has some rather terrible assumptions:
              1) that there haven't been any updates for Zsys because it's been abandoned (they literally just updated it)
              2) that ubuntu would switch to ZFS overnight and therefore it must have "stagnated"
              3) that ubuntu haven't put out a blog post in a while, so they must be loosing interest
              3) that the licencing remains "murky." (ubuntu have published their legal opinions at length now, with numerous other analyses to back them up from different angles. it's been shipping for 6+ years now, find another dead horse guys)

              It clear that ubuntu are instead taking the gradual approach, adding more ZFS support with each new release. First an official repo package, then an experimental installer option, then a supported ZFS-on-root configuration, and so on. And why should they rush? This is a very long-term project and one sure to cause breakage here and there, and most people are still warm and cozy with ext4.

              Comment

              • Developer12
                Senior Member
                • Dec 2019
                • 1574

                #17
                Originally posted by h**2 View Post
                Zsys is more or less dead in the water:
                https://github.com/ubuntu/zsys/issue...ent-1094112093
                Sounds like somebody who named their devices by /dev/sdX, which explicitly bad practice.

                Note that you didn't read their comment long enough to know they explicitly stated their problem is unrelated to Zsys.

                Originally posted by intelfx View Post
                Ah yeah, there goes our regular installment of anti-btrfs FUD. Go on... *yawn*
                BTRF "works" if you don't ever have a problem. No power outages, no bad sectors, nothing. When you do have a problem, there's a good chance it will explode _spectacularly._

                Reports of data loss with ZFS are comparatively very hard to find. In all the years fishworks made ZFS storage appliances nobody list data, ever. [1]

                On the contrary, EVERYONE has heard several stories of BTRFs barfing. eg:
                https://twitter.com/CongoCart/status/1501265045782732813
                continued: https://twitter.com/CongoCart/status...76401202311168

                [1] Except for exactly *one* occasion where someone literally *hand-edited a running kernel.* Ouch.
                Last edited by Developer12; 12 April 2022, 04:18 PM.

                Comment

                • skeevy420
                  Senior Member
                  • May 2017
                  • 8627

                  #18
                  Originally posted by RahulSundaram View Post

                  What use case is that? Many devices use this combo because they don't need any of the more advanced features in COW based filesystems in select situations and instead just want the raw better performance that COW based fs will not give you.You can totally switch if you want to https://github.com/Trevo525/btrfdeck
                  Case insensitivity. Due to Windows gaming and mods that file system feature is a hard requirement for the Steam Deck and likely SteamOS 3 in general. The OS is using BTRFS to take advantage of all its features, the user data, $HOME, however, is using Ext4 with a non-default mkfs command to enable case insensitivity. If BTRFS had case insensitivity they'd probably be using it for $HOME, too. I would if I were them -- being able to use reflinks and compression on Proton prefixes would save space...but saving a few GB isn't worth the headache of non-Linux users not being able to mod their favorite games and all the support tickets that will bring.

                  I can tell you from personal experience that it can be god awful trying to use various Elder Scrolls games mods on Linux due to case sensitivity issues.

                  And, holy shit, I don't necessarily agree with how homie in that link is using BTRFS zstd:15 on a partition for interactive data.
                  Last edited by skeevy420; 12 April 2022, 04:36 PM.

                  Comment

                  • bigletter
                    Junior Member
                    • Jul 2015
                    • 6

                    #19
                    Originally posted by MadWatch View Post
                    Such a shame. I had high hopes for ZSys. Which other distribution offer you the option to make a system snapshot every time you do an update and the possibility to revert to a previous snapshot from Grub in case something breaks and have all of it working out of the box?
                    Ubuntu kind of already does it, if you use btrfs and apt-btrfs-snapshot . it gets the job done, if you can handle the occasional grub command line fu to select the snapshot for recovery if fs gets unbootable.

                    Comment

                    • cl333r
                      Senior Member
                      • Oct 2009
                      • 2301

                      #20
                      Originally posted by Developer12 View Post

                      Far too buggy.

                      Propensity to eat the whole filesystem when there's a disk media error in the right spot, spiral-of-doom freespace pathologies when more than half the disk is full, and then the forever-broken raid implementation that the devs outright warn against using. The list goes on.

                      BTRFS has been perpetually unfinished for over 10 years now and I doubt it will ever get across the finish line. Honestly, nobody should be using it in it's truthfully-developmental state.
                      I've been wondering - are filesystems *this* difficult to create? Because I also remember Microsoft starting ReFS introduced in 2012 which to this day is pretty much dead except servers maybe.

                      Comment

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