Ubuntu's Zsys Tool For Enhancing The ZFS On Linux Experience Now Supports Snapshots

One of the work items we have been keen to monitor during the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS development cycle is tracking the happenings around Zsys, the Ubuntu/Canonical led utility for helping to administer ZFS On Linux systems. In ending out January, Zsys now has more functionality in tow.

The latest with Zsys as of this week for the Golang-written daemon and user-space utility is zsysctl save for saving the current user state (snapshot) by default but also options for saving the complete system state and all users and another option for saving the state of specified users.

This saving state is via rigging up ZFS On Linux snapshots support to Zsys, which landed last week. Zsys also now has per-user granularity for permission handling and other improvements. Of course, ZFS has long supported file-system snapshots and that is where all the heavy lifting happens.

It will be interesting to see if Ubuntu developers end up making use of this Zsys snapshot support for triggering file-system snapshots during system/package upgrades, similar to what Fedora, openSUSE, and others have done for system rollback support with Btrfs file-system's snapshots.

We're also excited to see what else they do for ZFS On Linux with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, which has been on an interesting trajectory since Ubuntu 19.10 when they made it incredibly easy to deploy the Ubuntu desktop atop ZoL.