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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: 1) by pTamok on Tuesday September 11 2018, @08:29PM

    by pTamok (3042) on Tuesday September 11 2018, @08:29PM (#733292)

    If you wanted to use ZFS for large storage arrays and used ext4 or something in mainline kernel for rootfs, that would all but remove the upgrade and bootloader issues and still give you the benefits of ZFS for data. I like being able to snapshot the OS drive though...

    If you don't mind something slightly funky, also without an fsck, use NILFS2 [wikipedia.org] for your rootfs. So long as you remember to ensure the NILFS2 module is included in GRUB2, it works fine. You probably will need to install via chrooting though, as I don't know of any installers that support NILFS2 natively.

    NILFS supports continuous snapshotting. In addition to versioning capability of the entire file system, users can even restore files mistakenly overwritten or destroyed just a few seconds ago. Since NILFS can keep consistency like conventional LFS, it achieves quick recovery after system crashes.

    NILFS creates a number of checkpoints every few seconds or per synchronous write basis (unless there is no change). Users can select significant versions among continuously created checkpoints, and can change them into snapshots which will be preserved until they are changed back to checkpoints.

    There is no limit on the number of snapshots until the volume gets full. Each snapshot is mountable as a read-only file system. It is mountable concurrently with a writable mount and other snapshots, and this feature is convenient to make consistent backups during use.

    Snapshot administration is easy and quickly performable. NILFS will make snapshotting or versioning of the POSIX filesystem much familiar to you. The possible use of NILFS includes, versioning, tamper detection, SOX compliance logging, and so forth. It can serve as an alternative filesystem for Linux desktop environment, or as a basis of advanced storage appliances.

    Alternatively, run your rootfs on its own LVM volume, sized to allow LVM snapshotting.