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0 pointsjjav4y ago0 comments

When filesystem integrity matters, the filesystem matters more than the OS.

While I mostly use Linux these days, for file servers it must be ZFS, which means whichever OS has first-class support for ZFS. I'm still on Illumos but perhaps will move to FreeBSD at some point.

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arid_eden4y ago

This is why FreeBSD rebasing its ZFS fork on ZFS-on-Linux made me so scared for the future of FreeBSD. Their one major advantage over Linux and they didn't have the developers to maintain their fork themselves.

laumars4y ago

ZFS will always be a smoother experience on FreeBSD as opposed to Linux because FreeBSD endorses it. Thus the user land and documentation is written assuming you’re running ZFS. As opposed to Linux where some distros might ship pre-compiled binaries but everything is written assuming you’re not running ZFS. Thus everything takes that extra couple of steps to set up, fix, and maintain.

For example, if you want to use ZFS as a storage for containers on Linux, you have to spend hours hunting around for some poorly maintained 3rd party shell scripts or build some tooling yourself. Whereas on FreeBSD all the tooling around Jails is built with ZFS in mind.

This is why platforms like FreeBSD feel more harmonious than Linux. Not because Linux can’t do the job but because there are so many different contributors with their own unique preferences that Linux is essentially loose Lego pieces with no instructions. Whereas FreeBSD has the same org who manage the kernel, user land and who also push ZFS.

And I say this as someone who loves Linux. There’s room for both Linux and FreeBSD in this world :)

mappu4y ago

I think "smoother experience on FreeBSD" is a myth -

The standard volume manager on FreeBSD is vinum/geom; ZFS ships its entire separate volume manager to the host OS, so you can't use mount/umount to control mounting a ZFS volume. Maybe it would be okay to move entirely over to ZFS's volume manager but it only supports ZFS's own filesystem, you can't use the ZFS volume manager with a normal FreeBSD UFS2 partition.

In both Linux and FreeBSD, ZFS's bolt-on ARC competes with the kernel's actual page cache for resources instead of properly integrating with it.

It's an out-of-tree filesystem for both OSes. Sure FreeBSD periodically imports it into master from OpenZFS (née ZoL), but all development happens elsewhere, and the SPL is still trying to emulate a Solaris interface on top of both OSes.

Is there any more concrete example of how ZFS is actually better integrated on FreeBSD compared to Linux, say Ubuntu? It takes ZFS snapshots automatically during apt upgrades, root-on-ZFS is a default installer option, etc.

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