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

[Volta]

ZFS would basically end the need for BTRFS and BCache.

Good joke. I rather stay with btrfs which is much safer than zfs.

[varikonniemi]

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.

I'm sorry i did not read carefully enough. This is not ZFS on root, but ZFS wrapped up in LUKS. Which immediately makes my initial post to need half as much praise as i did.

[varikonniemi]

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.

and that's why i applauded them for that part. Am i a zealot for expressing my concern, and preference for something else? You sure are bound to see zealots everywhere you go outside of your little zfs fanclub if you get that hostile whenever someone else voices a differing opinion.

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

Good joke. I rather stay with btrfs which is much safer than zfs.

Fun real life recent experience here. I've been mostly fine with Btrfs for root on Tumbleweed / Leap / Fedora for years now. But I just had Btrfs absolutely shit itself for seemingly no good reason on my main desktop two weeks ago. It locked hard when resuming from sleep. I had to power cycle the machine but it came back up. The same thing happened on the next sleep cycle. After that, I couldn't even log into a TTY or ssh session due to i/o errors. It starting spewing this over and over again ...

BTRFS error (device dm-1: state EA): bdev /dev/mapper/system-root errs: wr 113, rd XXXXXXXX, flush 0, corrupt 0, gen 0
BTRFS error (device dm-1: state EA): bdev /dev/mapper/system-root errs: wr 113, rd XXXXXXXX, flush 0, corrupt 0, gen 0
BTRFS error (device dm-1: state EA): bdev /dev/mapper/system-root errs: wr 113, rd XXXXXXXX, flush 0, corrupt 0, gen 0
BTRFS error (device dm-1: state EA): bdev /dev/mapper/system-root errs: wr 113, rd XXXXXXXX, flush 0, corrupt 0, gen 0

I suspected the drive was fine (SK Hynix Gold P31 NVMe). Sure enough, even putting some unnecessary wear on the NAND with a 4 pass run of badblocks showed the drive was perfectly fine. I've never had a ZFS pool / filesystem crap out like that.

[deusexmachina]

Why are people using Ubuntu? Void is the distro to use with ZFS.

[skeevy420]

I'm sorry i did not read carefully enough. This is not ZFS on root, but ZFS wrapped up in LUKS. Which immediately makes my initial post to need half as much praise as i did.

This is a ZFS Root on LUKS.

[darkbasic]

This is a ZFS Root on LUKS.

LOL, why?

[flower]

Why are people using Ubuntu? Void is the distro to use with ZFS.

Why are people using void? nixos is the distro to use with zfs

[woddy]

...you missed a word "EXPERIMENTAL".
I would never use it on a production server, words have meaning!

[skeevy420]

LOL, why?

That layout is more in line with Ubuntu's other file system offerings. If you click next blindly in the installer, regardless of what you pick customer service will have mostly the same help commands to try to fix problems if the only thing in the chain of command that changes is the file system and not how encryption and partitions are laid out.

Zsys never really took off outside of Ubuntu for that same reason because it was based on ZFS using GRUB with a split boot & root partition scheme that may or many not have been on top of LUKS. None of that utilizes ZFS's strengths. It's just how Ubuntu does things and Zsys acts as a way to place ZFS into the role of a traditional file system and framework the bootloader, encryption, and other features around that.

They're not exactly the same, but Zsys is to ZFS is as what Stratis is to XFS. They both framework features around a file system. The difference with Stratis is that RHEL and Fedora have made Stratis so easy for others to adopt that it's gone from AUR to now being part of the Arch repos while Zsys hasn't even made it to the AUR. It says a lot about a project without saying anything at all when something as high profile and well knows as Zsys doesn't make the AUR.