Ubuntu 19.10 Indeed Working On "Experimental ZFS Option" In Ubiquity Installer

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Ubuntu 19.10 Indeed Working On "Experimental ZFS Option" In Ubiquity Installer

It looks like in July we could finally see an "experimental ZFS" option within Ubuntu 19.10 and its daily images for those wanting an easy-to-use ZFS On Linux based installation of Ubuntu...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ubuntu-19.10-Experimental-ZFS

[w0wt1p]

For someone a bit out of the loop, is ZFS on Linux well integrated, reliable and has good performance?

I know (and have used) ZFS on FreeBSD, so I see why you might want to use it with Linux as well, but last I read about it, it was described as not very well integrated in the Linux system.

[gorgone]

hopefully ubuntu will not screw up again

[starshipeleven]

Something is TERRIBLY wrong, Canonical is actually doing something that makes sense for servers and people actually want.

RedHat is adding Stratis
SUSE and Oracle are developing Btrfs

Canonical is adopting ZFS

[thebear]

I keep reading (on the internetz) that ZFS is not suitable for single disk setups (no fsck etc.), is this (still) true? Would that mean that for my laptop (single NVMe SSD), I should keep using e.g. btrfs for my root partition?

[horizonbrave]

no fsck

I think it's selfhealing.. but I ususally don't know what I'm talking about :P
Single disk should be fine, I would be more worry eventually about memory requirements.
Actually, if you don't use ECC RAM would a raid 1 setup (and regular scrubs) help eventually bust bits flipping (bit rot)??

[starshipeleven]

I keep reading (on the internetz) that ZFS is not suitable for single disk setups (no fsck etc.), is this (still) true? Would that mean that for my laptop (single NVMe SSD), I should keep using e.g. btrfs for my root partition?

ZFS and btrfs have the same basic handling, they don't "fsck", they "scrub" to fix the filesystem or do so when you read the damaged file (and they have undamaged redundancy for it)

fsck tool for btrfs for example is NOT supposed to be used to fix the filesystem unless instructed by a developer, as it's there mostly to fix issues caused by bugs.
ZFS has a similar tool called "zdb", which again is more of a development tool than a fsck equivalent.

Both btrfs and ZFS in a default single-disk format will have fully redundant metadata, so in case of metadata corruption the filesystem can recover itself.

By default neither will be able to save the data with scrub as they don't have any redundancy. Since they are CoW filesystems though, you won't get this with an unclean shutdown (pulling the plug) and similar.

If you want full protection also from random data corruption (bit rot) you have to set them to have full data redundancy in the drive (and accept to double the size of everything as now it will be written twice)
For btrfs is "btrfs balance -dprofile=dup \path\to\mount\point"
for ZFS it's "zfs set copies=2 zvol_name_here"

Although on a SSD this may not be good enough because the SSD controller will see that you are writing the same stuff and may (or may not, SSDs are black boxes and can do these things while conventional hard drives don't) try to map both redundant blocks to the same physical area, in this case any issue that causes corruption to one will corrupt the other too.

[starshipeleven]

Single disk should be fine, I would be more worry eventually about memory requirements.
Actually, if you don't use ECC RAM would a raid 1 setup (and regular scrubs) help eventually bust bits flipping (bit rot)??

ZFS memory requirements aren't significant unless you are doing a RAID, and even then it's not huge unless you enable caches and deduplication (which do matter for serious arrays).

ECC RAM only protects from bit flips in the RAM which are a very rare event, most of the bit rot comes from storage controller or other system errors that have nothing to do with RAM and are much more frequent than RAM bitflips.

So while it's indeed recommended to have it in a NAS or storage server where the whole point is data storage, on a client device it's much less of a requirement.

[eydee]

Does it support 32-bit ZFS tho?

[Niarbeht]

ZFS memory requirements aren't significant unless you are doing a RAID, and even then it's not huge unless you enable caches and deduplication (which do matter for serious arrays).

ECC RAM only protects from bit flips in the RAM which are a very rare event, most of the bit rot comes from storage controller or other system errors that have nothing to do with RAM and are much more frequent than RAM bitflips.

So while it's indeed recommended to have it in a NAS or storage server where the whole point is data storage, on a client device it's much less of a requirement.

Cache (ARC, Adaptive Replacement Cache) is on by default for ZFS, but it automatically drops memory usage in response to memory pressure on the system. The only memory hog on ZFS is deduplication.