Hacker News Reader

Comment by barrkel | Hacker News Reader

Root zfs isn't worth it IMO.

As a FreeBSD user that has had root zfs for a while, and used zfs on solaris before that doing the same thing. Explain how it isn't worth it?

Made backing out of patches easy mode, snapshot, patch, reboot, if its effed up, go back to the snapshot with a reboot. The only thing I've seen that comes close is NixOS, but it takes a completely different take on those kinda things. Better in some ways. But zfs root is great, means you can just set compression on for log dirs and don't need to worry about compressing logs. Fs takes care of that for ya, now grep works fine, no zgrep etc... needed.

I honestly can't see why you wouldn't want to boot off it. Hell I just upgraded my FreeBSD nas box at home, took a snapshot of the entire pool before I did just in case things went south. It may not be as performant as some filesystems, but to be honest, with nvme ssd's, its a non issue.

So explain how it isn't worth it in your opinion? Experience for myself has proven otherwise. And made me loathe BTRFS for being so behind zfs of even 10 years ago. (I've had BTFS zero out data for a Makefile I had open while running make, if it wasn't in a git repo I would have been super pissed off)

I have a similar requirements out of my OS, but using a different approach.

I essentially boot Docker images bare-metal, directly from Grub.

https://godarch.com/

My recipes: https://github.com/pauldotknopf/darch-recipes

It's not a big win because the OS shouldn't have much data of any value, for similar reasons we don't generally back up our OS installs.

It certainly shouldn't be in the same pool as your actual data, the stuff you back up. /home can live in that pool though.

I have to squint really hard to see the upside of snapshotting anything other than things like /etc - I have in the past put /etc in git just to track ad-hoc changes.

Overall, for the base OS, a minimal set of defaults + a provisioning script does me.

It's a integration / packaging / polishing problem (caused by a licensing problem), technically it's 100% viable and desirable.

The kernel version supported by zfs is available on the release page.

0.8.2 is Compatible with 2.6.32 - 5.4 Linux kernels

You have to combine out of date zfs with bleeding edge kernels to have a difficulty.

Basically you just check the zfs release page before upgrading x.y to x.y+1

This could be trivially avoided with packaging

This is theory vs practice at its best, I've been running zroot from January 2017 until April 2019 on my primary machine, and got lots of empirical data (aka scary stories) to back up my claim ;)

a version 1 only works with b version >= 1 and <=17 is pretty basic stuff. If someone isn't doing it than submit an issue and run your own repo that does

Reply on news.ycombinator.com