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What is ZFS? Why are People Crazy About it?

posted by CoolHand on Tuesday September 11 2018, @03:29PM   Printer-friendly
from the zed-eff-ess-or-zee-eff-ess dept.

canopic jug writes:

John Paul Wohlscheid over at It's FOSS takes a look at the ZFS file system and its capabilities. He mainly covers OpenZFS which is the fork made since Oracle bought and shut down Solaris which was the original host of ZFS. It features pooled storage with RAID-like capabilities, copy-on-write with snapshots, data integrity verification and automatic repair, and it can handle files up to 16 exabytes in size, with file systems of up to 256 quadrillion zettabytes in size should you have enough electricity to pull that off. Because it started development under a deliberately incompatible license, ZFS cannot be directly integrated in Linux. However, several distros work around that and provide packages for it. It has been ported to FreeBSD since 2008.

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  • (Score: 2) by Entropy on Tuesday September 11 2018, @07:52PM (1 child)

    by Entropy (4228) on Tuesday September 11 2018, @07:52PM (#733279)

    Also the command line interface for ZFS is logical, and easy. BTRFS to me has always been a mess. Here's an example:
    The syntax:
    btrfs subvolume snapshot /tank/homes /tank/homes/mysnap
    vs
    zfs snapshot tank/homes@mysnap

    Please note that afterwords in BTRFS you're left with a subdirectory "mysnap" that you have to deal with if you do something like rsync. Not only is it mounted and impossible to unmount it's writable for no apparent reason. Why would I want to write to my snapshot, exactly?! In ZFS you don't have that problem as that is hidden. If for some reason you want it to be writable, you can duplicate it easily enough and then mount it somewhere.

    Also for virtual machines I can use a zvol under ZFS. Not only that but I can block level replicate the ZVOL device to another computer. BTRFS has no such capability.

    Everyone talks about the license vs GPL, but license aside if you just want the best filesystem out there give ZFS a try.

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  • (Score: 2) by pendorbound on Tuesday September 11 2018, @08:07PM

    by pendorbound (2688) on Tuesday September 11 2018, @08:07PM (#733285) Homepage

    My favorite part of virtual machines on zVOL's is backups. Traditional disk image file VM's, you boot the VM and most of the whole umpteen GB group of image files is "dirty" for your next backup. With zVOL's, only the blocks your VM actually modified get backed up in the next snapshot / zfs send. There's no need to send an entire 2GB image file just because one byte in that particular slice got changed.