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Comment by ahachete | Hacker News Reader

> and technically you can also use ZFS on Linux, even if it's painful

Maybe on some distros, but on Ubuntu is just an `apt-get install` away, or can be even be added from installation time. I've been using it for many years without any issues and the experience is great.

I actually combine some non-ZFS filesystems with ZFS with encryption and compression for all my setups, including my laptop. I plan to blog shortly about it and how I'm automating it all. Target is also a Framework laptop, too.

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Can you actually do a full root-on-zfs setup with linux these days? Last I heard support wasn't 100% in the ubuntu installer. I recently installed FreeBSD on my new media server box, with the full os being in one ZFS pool spread across 4 disks (raidz1).

This is one of my favorite things about FreeBSD, I love being able to take a snapshot of my system before doing an update.

I recently did an arch with zfs root setup. You have to make a custom install ISO that has the zfs module to do it. After it's installed the main annoyance is the zfs module only works with certain kernel versions and often arch has updated the kernel to a version not supported. There's a repo with pinned kernel versions or you can just use the lts kernel.

FreeBSD is much easier but I needed better Linux compatibility for this machine

We run ZFS for a system at work on linux. Yea, it isn't as seamless and nice on FreeBSD. Only reason we aren't running FreeBSD is the application that needs to access that storage is .NET, and no .NET support for FreeBSD.

There is .NET support for FreeBSD but it is relatively recent; FreshPorts lists it as added in January 2024. See:

- https://www.freshports.org/lang/dotnet/ - https://wiki.freebsd.org/.NET - https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/14537

Currently it looks like it's currently just 9.0.10

Will check this out! I knew there was a group who had a version working, but it wasn't upstreamed and last I check was still stuck at .NET 5. While I would like to migrate from Debian to FreeBSD, probably won't get management to okay that with current services, but future one, maybe!

Makes sense, out of curiosity have you tried the linux jails that Bastille offers? [0]

They're still considered experimental so I wouldn't run it for production but I wonder how well .Net would run in one. The whole container could be a zfs dataset, which would be interesting.

[0] https://docs.bastillebsd.org/en/latest/chapters/gettingstart...

I would guess they run well.

I use the Linuxulator for a few different tasks.

If I'm not mistaken, since 25.04 root-on-ZFS is available (as experimental) in the installer.

I still prefer to do root on ext4 and then a proper ZFS pool for all the mountpoints I want, where I can configure as I wish with encryption and compression. Primary reason is that I don't keep sensitive data on root, but I want a bootable system whatever happens. And this use case is perfectly supported, so it's more than enough for me.

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