On Thu, 30 May 2024 10:15:18 -0700 Kent Borg <kentb...@borg.org> wrote:
> I would amend that: Any new deployment…that is conventional (from > ZFS's perspective) and can afford the necessary expertise. While ZFS's *syntax* is different from say LVM + ext4, in *practice* it's quite simpler: zpool create tank /dev/sda /dev/sdb... zfs create tank/mydata vs gdisk /dev/sda, create partition; repeat with /dev/sdb... pvcreate /dev/sda1; repeat with /dev/sdb1... vgcreate volumegroup /dev/sda /dev/sdb... lvcreate -L size volumegroup logicalvol mkfs.ext4 /dev/mapper/volumegroup-logicalvol mkdir /mountpoint edit fstab mount /mountpoint Want to change a mountpoint? zfs set mountpoint=/path/to/mydata zpool/mydata and now mydata is mounted as /path/to/mydata instead of /zpool/mydata. Want compression? Simple: zfs set compression=on pool/dataset Can't do that with the commonly used filesystems (ext2 has a simple compression mechanism but it's clunky and to my knowledge was never forward ported to ext3 and ext4). That's the default algorithm there by the way, but there are others which balance performance and compression. Want encryption on your dataset? zfs create -o encryption=on -o keylocation=prompt \ -o keyformat=passphrase pool/dataset for a simple example, and you'd import this after reboot with zpool import pool -l '-l' tells zpool to request encryption keys for encrypted datasets. Doing anything even vaguely similar with LVM + anything else, or just anything else, requires mucking around with cryptsetup and loopback devices. > matter of taste, I found it ornery. And it flat out *crashed* when I > tried to do the same stuff on a Raspberry PI 4. I was certainly doing And as I have noted in the past, SD cards are inherently flakey. Your Pi itself might be flakey. Or overheating. Or power management is set wrong. Or insufficient power. Or any number of possible root causes which aren't ZFS itself. > As far as I can tell ZFS is a specialized tool, with impressive > features, but rough edges. It is not a smoothly crafted, general > purpose package suited to a general audience. I almost agree on a technicality: ZFS was not designed for a "general audience". It was designed to be the last word -- or at least the last letter, "Z" -- in enterprise scalability and performance. But it just so happens to be really good at smaller scales, too. Better than almost anything else I've used, but I have a fondness for Digital's AdvFS for OSF/1 aka Tru64 Unix and there may be nostalgia goggles in the way. -- \m/ (--) \m/ _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@driftwood.blu.org https://driftwood.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
