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Comment by kbumsik | Hacker News Reader

Maybe change the title? It's not ZFS v0.8.2, it's ZFS on Linux v0.8.2.

FreeBSD is migrating to ZoL: https://papers.freebsd.org/2019/bsdcan/jude-the_future_of_op...

Yes, but even if they won't call it ZoL anymore, it's not ZFS either, right? ZFS itself is a closed source product by Oracle which doesn't share the same codebase.

The issue is, that they do share codebase, however old it is, otherwise there would not be the licensing problem.

I didn't know that, but this is much bigger news to me. I have been always told that the biggest reason to use FreeBSD is ZFS a long time ago. Things has been changed that much since then.

On FreeBSD 11.x and 12.x (and older ones) the currently by default remains the old (not ZFS on Linux) ZFS implementation that has lots of FreeBSD additions like TRIM that was lacked on Linux.

FreeBSD forked ZFS on Linux GitHub repo and now its called ZFS on FreeBSD. You can try it already by installing these two ports:

- sysutils/zol

- sysutils/openzfs-kmod

Regards, vermaden

>FreeBSD forked ZFS on Linux GitHub repo and now its called ZFS on FreeBSD. You can try it already by installing these two ports:

Correct me if I am wrong, So we now have

Oracle ZFS, FreeBSD ZFS, ZFS on Linux and ZFS on FreeBSD?

Damn, I could've used this a few weeks ago. I moved my NAS from bare Ubuntu + ZoL to FreeNAS, and got stuck on a read-only pool because of unsupported features such as userobj_accounting (1). I had to zfs send/receive to external drives and back again to work around this, which was annoying, to say the least.

[1] http://open-zfs.org/wiki/Feature_Flags

This is kind of standard faire though. I did a `zpool upgrade` on my root pool once and broke GRUB's ability to boot my system, since there were features enabled that it didn't understand (wouldn't have hurt anything to ignore, but GRUB wants to play it safe obviously).

I think FreeBSD still offers a more cohesive (and native) out of the box ZFS experience. For example, you do not need to worry about kernel upgrades/DKMS going sideways and breaking ZFS.

I didn't have any problems on NixOS thus far. Of course, it doesn't use or need DKMS. Also, doing a root on ZFS install was as simple as installing root on brtfs.

Mind sharing what guide(s) you used? ZoL has always seemed like a moving target for me. The nice thing about Nix is it helps to manage problems like those.

The wiki page:

https://nixos.wiki/wiki/NixOS_on_ZFS

"FreeBSD is migrating to ZoL"

This is correct - and good news - but there should be a reality check involved with regard to timelines ...

ZoL code is most likely not going to be part of any 12-RELEASE distributions, which means that:

IF you only run -RELEASE in production (a good policy) AND if you do not put a x.0 release into production (historically, a good policy) then you are 2-3 years away from running this ZoL code:

http://freebsd.1045724.x6.nabble.com/How-many-quot-productio...

As it stands now, our customers want encryption and raw send which we provide to them using ZoL, on 12, in ports form, in a VM.

This is how people zfs-send encrypted snapshots to rsync.net.

Our base ZFS platform, however, will most likely not run a ZFS version that doesn't come with a -RELEASE version of FreeBSD with a x.0 version number. Not a big deal when everyone is using borg and restic anyway, but I digress...

Regardless, plain ZFS should be used for Oracle ZFS. What we have is OpenZFS and various flavors of it like ZFS-on-Linux, ZFS/illumos, ZFS/FreeBSD. The things are going towards ZoL getting proclaimed as the OpenZFS.

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