Ubuntu 24.04 Supports Easy Installation Of OpenZFS Root File-System With Encryption

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Ubuntu 24.04 Supports Easy Installation Of OpenZFS Root File-System With Encryption

For those wondering about the OpenZFS root file-system support for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, it's in-place with the Ubuntu desktop installer. Not only is it still there but now there's also the ability to easily setup Ubuntu atop an OpenZFS encrypted root file-system...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/OpenZFS-Ubuntu-24.04-LTS

[varikonniemi]

This is a real ace in the sleeve of ubuntu. I don't support zfs due to their licensing shit, but for those that insist on it i think it's nice to have a popular distro offer great support.

Admittedly, you are putting yourself kind of in a vendor lock-in in the sense that it's not plug&play anymore to migrate.

[Noitatsidem]

I'd rather use something upstreamable but nobody can say this doesn't make ubuntu a compelling distro to a lot of users.

[zexelon]

For the love of all things good in computing... can we not get this license figured out?

I get why Linus does not want this in tree... and Oracle is now probably more evil then Nvidia has ever been on the licensing front... but come on! ZFS would basically end the need for BTRFS and BCache. Having used ZFS in a testing capacity it is awesome, but the licensing and "out of tree" issue makes me super hesitant about using it on production systems.

You can now achieve basically everything ZFS using LVM and its million modules... but setup and maintenance rapidly becomes a nightmare in complex deployments.

[skeevy420]

This is a real ace in the sleeve of ubuntu. I don't support zfs due to their licensing shit, but for those that insist on it i think it's nice to have a popular distro offer great support.

Admittedly, you are putting yourself kind of in a vendor lock-in in the sense that it's not plug&play anymore to migrate.

If you're talking about the root disk, the OS disk, that's arguably true with any file system and partition scheme that any distribution could come up with. Especially so when it comes to the advanced setups that ZFS, Btrfs, Bcachefs, etc can offer and is exponentially so when it comes to DeviceMapper, LVM, LUKS, etc which is what Stratis is trying to solve. It sucks that Stratis devs picked "only XFS" instead of "any applicable Linux file system".

Ubuntu's setup is just ZFS over LUKS. If someone knows what they're doing it wouldn't be that hard for them to manually install another OS to Ubuntu's encrypted ZFS setup.

It's not vendor lock-in, it's just complicated and most tools aren't designed around multibooting using pools and volumes (ZFS or other). There is no universal Linux installer that understands every file system and setup which makes every Linux install some form of vendor lock-in if you don't know what you're doing. Hell, that applies to every OS install.

[spicfoo]

For the love of all things good in computing... can we not get this license figured out?

No. "We" cannot do anything about this. Oracle is the primary copyright holder. They did relicense Dtrace but only after bpftrace already became well established and it is possible for them to relicense ZFS but doubtful they would want to.

[skeevy420]

For the love of all things good in computing... can we not get this license figured out?

I get why Linus does not want this in tree... and Oracle is now probably more evil then Nvidia has ever been on the licensing front... but come on! ZFS would basically end the need for BTRFS and BCache. Having used ZFS in a testing capacity it is awesome, but the licensing and "out of tree" issue makes me super hesitant about using it on production systems.

You can now achieve basically everything ZFS using LVM and its million modules... but setup and maintenance rapidly becomes a nightmare in complex deployments.

The licensing is moot in regards to end users. It is meaningless. It only matters if you build and ship ZFS modules....just like the NVIDIA license. That's why there's nothing to figure out. You pick a distribution that supports ZFS and you go on with life. It sucks when your distribution of choice doesn't support ZFS, but that's something that should be raised with your distribution of choice and not blame ZFS for. It's not like there's ample support for Bcachefs or Stratis across the entire Linux ecosystem.

AMD has more restrictive licensing on their compilers and libraries. Distributions can't ship AOCC or AOCL. You can only get it from AMD. It's a nightmare having to go to AMD's site to download a tarbell and place it in the right directory so a damn AUR package can build because the licensing is so restrictive that it can't be scripted to download from AMD. You have to actually do it manually. At least ZFS is open source and freely distributed. It sucks it can't be added in natively, but can't be added in natively hasn't stopped NVIDIA from having a very thriving ecosystem on Linux.

[Jumbotron]

This is a real ace in the sleeve of ubuntu. I don't support zfs due to their licensing shit, but for those that insist on it i think it's nice to have a popular distro offer great support.

Admittedly, you are putting yourself kind of in a vendor lock-in in the sense that it's not plug&play anymore to migrate.

I’m ok with this as the choice is up to the user. If you’re a zealot then don’t use ZFS. I applaud Canonical for offering this in Ubuntu.

[Chugworth]

Will ZFS be a a choice for server installs? It seems like they've always had that backwards.

[darkbasic]

I'll never understand why Ubuntu stopped funding zsys. It gave them an HUGE edge over any competitor yet they decided to throw it away.