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from the someday-coming-to-a-phone-near-you? dept.
For those Linux folks out there, imagine merging LVM2, dm-raid, and your file system of choice into an all powerful, enterprise ready, check-summed, redundant, containerized, soft raid, disk pool, ram hungry, demi-god file system. The FreeBSD Handbook is a good start to grep the basic capabilities and function of ZFS[*].
The Ars reports:
A new long-term support (LTS) version of Ubuntu is coming out in April, and Canonical just announced a major addition that will please anyone interested in file storage. Ubuntu 16.04 will include the ZFS filesystem module by default, and the OpenZFS-based implementation will get official support from Canonical.
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ZFS is used primarily in cases where data integrity is important—it's designed not just to store data but to continually check on that data to make sure it hasn't been corrupted. The oversimplified version is that the filesystem generates a checksum for each block of data. That checksum is then saved in the pointer for that block, and the pointer itself is also checksummed. This process continues all the way up the filesystem tree to the root node, and when any data on the disk is accessed, its checksum is calculated again and compared against the stored checksum to make sure that the data hasn't been corrupted or changed. If you have mirrored storage, the filesystem can seamlessly and invisibly overwrite the corrupted data with correct data.
ZFS was available as a technology preview in Ubuntu 15.10, but the install method was a bit more cumbersome than just apt-get install zfsutils-linux. I for one am excited to see ZFS coming to Linux as it is a phenomenal solution for building NAS devices and for making incremental backups of a file system. Now I just wish Ubuntu would do something about the systemD bug.
[*] According to Wikipedia:
ZFS is a combined file system and logical volume manager designed by Sun Microsystems. The features of ZFS include protection against data corruption, support for high storage capacities, efficient data compression, integration of the concepts of filesystem and volume management, snapshots and copy-on-write clones, continuous integrity checking and automatic repair, RAID-Z and native NFSv4 ACLs.
ZFS was originally implemented as open-source software, licensed under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL). The ZFS name is registered as a trademark of Oracle Corporation.
OpenZFS is an umbrella project aimed at bringing together individuals and companies that use the ZFS file system and work on its improvements.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 19 2016, @06:54AM
This question was answered in a nuanced manner on the BSD Now show "ZFS in the trenches" and different developers have different opinions but all recommended ECC if possible. In the episode Josh Paetzel of FreeNAS explains that if the ZFS spacemaps were corrupted due to memory errors you could be in a worse situation compared to less sophisticated filesystems that have corrupt data an fsck would destroy in an attempt to recover the rest [youtu.be].
(Score: 2, Insightful) by pTamok on Friday February 19 2016, @10:58AM
Is there a text article somewhere that goes into these issues?
I'm afraid I have an old-school preference for text over video. It suits the reading and comprehension process I have honed over a lifetime.
I am trying very hard not to make a value-judgement about the utility of video as an information transfer mechanism, and I know I'm probably partially ossified in my ways.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Francis on Friday February 19 2016, @08:55PM
Not just that, you can skim through quickly to get a rough sense of what's going on before going into things in depth. Greatly improves the comprehension.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Saturday February 20 2016, @01:33AM
I used to think that, until I discovered the joys of playing YouTube videos using mpv at 1.33x speed or faster. You can nudge the speed faster or slower depending on the content, but I've found the average informational video works well at 1.33x.
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