Is zfs really worth the hassle, for someone who does not have time to play "home sysadmin" more than once or twice a year?<p>I've just rebuilt my little home server (mostly for samba, plus a little bit of docker for kids to play with). It has a hardware raid1 enclosure, with 2TB formatted as ext4, and the really important stuff is sent to the cloud every night. Should I honestly bother learning zfs...? I see it popping up more and more but I just can't see the benefits for occasional use.
The biggest advantage of ZFS from a operational experience, is that when you have problems, ZFS tells you why. Checksum errors? Something wrong with the hard drive or SATA/SAS cables. Is the disk slow, zfs events will tell you that it spent more than 5 seconds to read sector x from disk /dev/sdf. The zfs cli commands are super-intuitive, and makes fully sense. Compared to ie. virsh, which is just weird to manage vm's.<p>It definitely worth the hassle. But if everything works fine for you now, don't bother. ZFS is not going away and you can learn it later.
When setting up root-on-ZFS on FreeBSD, it's worth knowing about boot environments (a concept originally from Solaris):<p>* <a href="https://klarasystems.com/articles/managing-boot-environments/" rel="nofollow">https://klarasystems.com/articles/managing-boot-environments...</a><p>* <a href="https://wiki.freebsd.org/BootEnvironments" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.freebsd.org/BootEnvironments</a><p>* <a href="https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=bectl" rel="nofollow">https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=bectl</a><p>* <a href="https://dan.langille.org/category/open-source/freebsd/bectl/" rel="nofollow">https://dan.langille.org/category/open-source/freebsd/bectl/</a><p>* <a href="https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2022/03/14/zfs-boot-environments-revolutions/" rel="nofollow">https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2022/03/14/zfs-boot-environme...</a><p>It lets you patch/upgrade an isolated environment without touching the running bits, reboot into that environment, and if things aren't working well boot back into the last known-good one.
Sounds a lot like the A/B update method used widely in Android and to a lesser extend for embedded GNU/Linux OTA updates. But it uses two distinct boot partitions. Since ZFS is involved here, I assume that boot environments take advantage of its copy-on-write mechanism to avoid duplicating the entire boot dataset.<p>NixOS and Guix use a concept called 'system generations' to do the same without the support of the filesystem. LibOSTree can do the same and is called 'atomic rollback'.<p>Talking about NixOS, does anybody know of a similar concept in the BSD world (preferably FreeBSD)?
Best feature of freebsd. I have really messed up the system and successfully restored a boot environment snapshot and everything is fine after.<p>It happens by default with freebsd-update (I hope the new pkg replacement still does it too)
oh, i didnt knew the concept is taken from Solaris, which version of Solaris? and is there any official source that indicates it is from Solaris?
This is getting lots of upvotes and rightfully so. I think people would love more posts about FreeBSD: especially about ZFS and <i>bhyve</i> (the FreeBSD hypervisor).<p>It's a bit sad that this Lenovo ThinkCentre ain't using ECC. I use and know ZFS is good but I'd prefer to run it on a machine supporting ECC.<p>I never tried FreeBSD but I'm reading more and more about it and it looks like although FreeBSD has always had its regular users, there are now quite some people curious about trying it out. For a variety of reasons. The possibility of having ZFS by default <i>and</i> an hypervisor <i>without</i> systemd is a big one for me (I run Proxmox so I'm halfway there but <i>bhyve</i> looks like it'd allow me to be completely systemd free).<p>I'm running systemd-free VMs and systemd-free containers (long live non-systemd PID ones) so <i>bhyve</i> looks like it could the final piece of the puzzle to be free of Microsoft/Poettering's systemd.
You express a desire for more FreeBSD posts and then immediately wade into all the typical flame-warring that surrounds most BSD/ZFS posts (systemd, ECC RAM), and it's been that way for over a decade at this point.
"I think people would love more posts about FreeBSD"
Translate to: "I would love more post..."
other filesystems are just as susceptible to data corruption from memory errors. this is not a weakness unique to ZFS.