I’ve been thinking of switching from btrfs to zfs but it seems like it’s quite a bit of work. Does anyone have any experience with this?

  • ScottE@lemm.ee
    13·
    11 个月前

    I use it everywhere, raidz2 on HDDs for a NAS also with mirrored NVMe root pool, and on a couple of laptops. zfsbootmenu is awesome, so I can boot into any snapshot, and a pacman hook that creates a snapshot whenever I upgrade packages. Even if it’s overkill for some of my use, I use it anyway and trust it much more than anything else - it has a proven track record. Backups to rsync.net are a breeze with borg/borgmatic.

    • maxprime@lemmy.mlOP
      3·
      11 个月前

      I like the idea of deduplication and checksumming to prevent bit rot. It also sounds like backups via snapshots is extremely powerful, but maybe that’s something btrfs can do too.

      Ultimately though it would be about learning. That’s what’s drawn me to Linux in the first place.

  • Nilz@sopuli.xyz
    4·
    11 个月前

    I am using ZFS on root on Arch using 2x 2TB SSDs striped . I mainly did it because my server runs on ZFS as well and thought snapshotting and backup would be easy, but instead went with Borg backup anyway.

    Installation wasn’t very difficult, but the ZFS kernel modules can’t keep up with kernel updates (even with LTS kernel) on Arch, so I constantly need to do partial upgrades and it’s been annoying. As much as I love ZFS I’m not sure I’d do it again on Arch. If your distro is not using bleeding edge kernels then I don’t foresee any issues really.

    • Lemmchen@feddit.org
      1·
      11 个月前

      Is there an easy way to install distros on a ZFS root that are not supported by debootstrap?

      • Nilz@sopuli.xyz
        3·
        11 个月前

        It is, but with kernel-specific packages you have the kernel linux(-lts) and the kernel module zfs-linux(-lts) and they aren’t in sync. Even with the LTS kernel I run into the issue that I can’t update the kernel since there’s a dependency issue between ZFS and Linux.

        I have both LTS and zen and I’m currently on 6.6.36 and 6.9.7 respectively.

  • Read Bio@lemm.eeEnglish
    2·
    11 个月前

    I try to avoid zfs because I don’t wanna use a external kernel module, I already have 1 external kernel module (nvidia) already.

  • apt_install_coffee@lemmy.ml
    2·
    11 个月前

    I used ZFS with Arch for a while, the volume manager was what I’d call the largest benefit; in my opinion nothing else comes close to being as useful and well integrated.

    I stopped because ZFS incompatibility with recent kernels (which I needed for GPU reasons) made me have to rescue my system more often than was ideal.

    Some other minor downsides:

    • boot can take ages due to ZFS using udev-settle.
    • deduplication status is… Complicated.
    • you’re kind-of stuck with the performance of your slowest vdev; L2ARC & a metadata device don’t really compensate well for a zpool that is predominantly a raid-z2 of spinning rust.
  • Antithetical@lemmy.deedium.nl
    2·
    11 个月前

    Yes, and it saved my ass a few times. Every computer I own now and in the future will have at least mirrored or raidz disks with zfs. On all desktops, laptops, servers and nas.

    Even upgrading from spinning rust to ssd was easy replacing the disks one by one and resilvering.

    The (k)ubuntu installation made it very easy to have an encrypted zfs rootfs but they may have removed it on newer installation iso’s, I’m not sure…