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Playing with ZFS (on Linux) Encryption

posted by martyb on Sunday June 25 2017, @03:23AM   Printer-friendly
from the rot13++ dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

A blog has a walkthrough of using ZFS encryption on Linux:

In order to have a simple way to play with the new features of ZFS, it makes sense to have a safe "sandbox". You can pick an old computer, but in my case I decide to use a VM. It is tempting to use docker, but it won't work because we need a special kernel module to be able to use the zfs tools.

For the setup, I've decide to use VirtualBox and Archlinux, since those are a few tools that I'm more familiar with. And modifying the zfs-dkms package to build from the branch that hosts the encryption PR is really simple.

[...] Finally we are able to enjoy encryption in zfs natively in linux. This is a feature that was long due. The good thing is that this new implementation improved a few of the problems that the original one had, especially around key management. It is not binary compatible, which is fine in most cases and still not ready to be used in production, but so far I really like what I see.

If you want to follow progress, you can watch the current PR in the official git repo of the project. If everything keeps going ok, I would hope this feature to land in version 0.7.1

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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by TheRaven on Sunday June 25 2017, @11:03AM (2 children)

    by TheRaven (270) on Sunday June 25 2017, @11:03AM (#530839) Journal
    ZFS needs about on 1GB of RAM per TB of disk. On a VM, you most likely have a lot less than even 1TB, so the RAM requirements are pretty low. There are also a bunch of advantages using ZFS for VMs. It's easy to take incremental backups, but most importantly you can trivially add new disks to a ZFS pool, so if you want to grow your VM's storage then nothing other than the kernel needs to be aware that you've added some new disks. I've been using ZFS on FreeBSD VMs with under 1GB of RAM for a few years now without issue.
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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 25 2017, @05:10PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 25 2017, @05:10PM (#530908)

    > ZFS needs about on 1GB of RAM per TB of disk

    Only if you're using dedup (and possibly, RAIDZ) -- on Linux, it uses less RAM than the Solaris implementation.

    • (Score: 2) by fnj on Monday June 26 2017, @05:26AM

      by fnj (1654) on Monday June 26 2017, @05:26AM (#531141)

      Incorrect. 1GB per TB is the minimum for comfort whether you have RAID or not. 5GB per TB at a minimum is the guideline if you use dedup.

      You can make it work with less, but performance will suffer to an excruciating degree.