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Comment by adamnemecek | Hacker News Reader

You might be aware of this but FreeBSD has all of those features that you mention. The objections that you have against Solaris might still apply though.

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Yes. I'm running ZFS on Linux and while ZFS is really great it's not really good integrated in the kernel and sometimes pretty unstable at least in my rather esoteric scenario... Despite other claims FreeBSD suffers similar problems.. (https://clusterhq.com/blog/complexity-freebsd-vfs-using-zfs-...). Other problems are that jails are fine but there is no disk I/O limitation possible...

I've also thought about FreeBSD and while pkgng is really great it's a similar problem.. I'm stumbling upon bugs or untested things and I'm unable to contribute time to fixing them.

Do you mind pointing to your PR's with the bugs you've found or at least mention what they were? It sound like you've found a hell of a bugs/problems in a system (and I am thinking about FreeBSD now) that me and huge number of other people are running without any issues, so it would be beneficial for everyone, if you'd share your problems with PR's - there is active community around it that can fix issues if you are unable to do it.

Sorry if I was unclear. I stumbled upon a few issues running ZFS on Linux that are known and on the development roadmap. Things like ARC integration and better failure handling in case of disk problems.

I don't run anything big on FreeBSD and ZFS. I have not experienced problems on a raidz2 ZFS fileserver that runs FreeBSD except that disks drop out quite randomly but I've yet been unable to pinpoint that and it's likely that these are hardware issues as the system runs on budget hardware.

Sorry if my comment spreaded FUD.

This might be of use to you: http://open-zfs.org/w/index.php?title=Hardware#Error_recover...

The biggest problem I've had with ZFS on Linux is that the arc_cache won't back off from memory quick enough. There's still an edge case in their somewhere where it hits swap and effectively locks up (its still running, just amazingly slowly). The fix is to set the arc_limit low (like 1GB) - it's not a hard limit, but it stops it eating all the RAM on my 8gb ram box.

Swap on zvols is not fully stable on Linux yet. I have patches in the works for 0.6.4 that should improve things.

Did you consider Brtfs? Are there missing feature you don't have compared to ZFS-on-linux?

How's KVM on FreeBSD these days?

The port was abandoned as no one was willing to finish it. FreeBSD developers have since written their own hypervisor called byhve.

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