ZFS has actually been around for quite some time. It was originally invented by Sun for use in Solaris. It has many advanced features like an improved RAID5 called RAIDZ. And though there's a bit of a learning curve it eliminates some complexity, like the need for a separate logical volume manager.
With the release of Ubuntu 20.04 it'll be possible to use it for your entire desktop system. But why would you want to use a "server" filesystem on your desktop PC? Well, in short, it makes upgrading your system bulletproof. Now every time you upgrade packages with apt it'll create a snapshot automagically. If something goes wrong there'll be a boot menu option that'll let you rollback your entire system to before the upgrade. It's fast, easy and you won't even know it happened, until you need it.
While technically it's still an experimental feature, I expect it'll become the default install option at some point in the future. If you haven't familiarized yourself with ZFS yet, now would be a good time to do so.
I installed Xubuntu 20.04 on my old i7-6500U laptop this morning using ZFS for everything. GParted doesn't see any partitions, just all of /dev/sda being formatted with ZFS. Gnome-disk-utility (Disks app) sees four partitions, sda1-4 with the last two being ZFS pools. And inxi sees a redundant array of independent disks using just one physical drive. So while the install was easy and the snapshots are automatic, it's definitely a little confusing.
ReplyDeleteUbuntu 20.04's installer didn't set the new autotrim property for ZFS on my 3D SSD.
ReplyDeleteTo verify you can:
zpool get all rpool
and to fix:
sudo zpool set autotrim=on rpool
I'm SOLD on ZFS. Saying it's a just another filesystem with an integrated logical volume manager or an enhanced RAID5 is terribly understating its abilities. It mirrors, it load balances, it does multiple parity drives, it does hot spares, it checksums, it encrypts, it trims SSD, it makes coffee. OK, maybe not the coffee, but it literally does EVERYTHING else. And best of all, everything you need to know is in the man page. You don't need to buy a book to figure it out if you already know the basic concepts (RAID LVM etc). It just might be the best thing since sliced bread. ?:^)
ReplyDelete