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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

Run ZFS backed filestore on FreeBSD, have migrated it to/from Debian. At work and home, not petabyte scale but certainly multi hundred terrabyte. Over 15 years, on over 50 hosts/NAS/SAN instances, different hardware.

Run ZFS on Raspberry Pi, on home builds, on Intel, on AMD, on other ARM chipsets.

I think you're over-stating things. Debian is fine for this. I do think FreeBSD is a better platform for myself.

The code bases adhere (modulo ZFS version numbers) to a spec and you can safely migrate the pools between OS. I've done it multiple times both directions.

You can not do this with BTRFS and other Linux things, I consider this feature of (Open)ZFS a killer-context for me: It's OS portable. I wish Mac OSX hadn't walked out of the room when Oracle went legal.

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Sure you can migrate pools.

Yet everyone is (again) lost in the details and missing the big picture, which is Linux is doing its best to rat fuck OpenZFS at every opportunity, the last of which was the elimination of write_cache_pages in 6.18 behind the GPL iron curtain a mere few months ago.

I don't know about you but I don't want to build my file storage atop hacks on top of more hacks. The kernel has made it clear non-GPL code is not welcome. Struggles will continue in perpetuity. There are better options.

I understand and I agree from an experience point of view it felt very unstable on debian and proxmox that is debian based.

I wanted to share this experience too as a warning to users investing time and money and possibly hitting instabilities that can cause raid problems and data loss. Don't know why my comment got downvoted, if I knew about this I would have handled things differently.

I usually recovered the pool thanks to other disks being fine, but beside zfs being super cool in terms of features and flexibility at the beginning it actually felt unreliable and I would not suggest it neither!

as mentioned it is probably more stable on other families but I didnt experience that yet.

would freebsd be the most reliable? or which one would have the most reliable zfs module state?

do other solutions like unraid or truenas or similar use zfs the background?

> or which one would have the most reliable zfs module state?

Can't get more reliable ZFS than on illumos. OmniOS on napp-it if you want GUI[0].

[0] https://www.napp-it.org/index_en.html

I guess you can try Windows next - https://github.com/openzfsonwindows/openzfs

> You can not do this with BTRFS

There is actually a btrfs driver for Windows [0]. I've used it a few times before, and it works surprisingly well. You probably wouldn't want to use it for any serious work, but that's not because it's technically flawed, but more because it isn't extensively tested or commercially-supported.

[0]: https://github.com/maharmstone/btrfs

There is Fuse support in BSD. I don't consider that a good choice for this role.

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