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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: 2) by TheRaven on Monday February 22 2016, @03:07PM
Every time I've lost power with ZFS, I've had to do a ZFS import to get my data again
That sounds like you're doing something very badly wrong. ZFS was explicitly designed to handle abrupt outages. What kind of disks were you using? The only cases where I can think of that would cause this kind of issue are ones where the disk lies to the OS about whether data is actually committed to persistent storage. On a single disk, it should just be a matter of replaying the ZIL (very fast). On a RAID configuration, there will be a background scrub that will eventually fix errors where the disks powered down asymmetrically (these will also be fixed on first read if that happens before the scrub gets to a particular block).
lz4 is in the OpenZFS spec and I think ZoL implements it. I though the original compression was something other than gzip.
Originally it used lzjb (fast, not very good compression) or gzip (slow, good compression). lz4 is both fast and provides fairly good compression (not as good as gzip), but it also contains paths to bail early: if your data is very high entropy, then lz4 will not attempt to compress it. This means that you can turn it on for things that are already compressed and you won't burn too many cycles (which means compression won't slow down the write path - it won't slow down the read path noticeably for any of the algorithms unless you're using a fairly exotic NVRAM hardware).
sudo mod me up