undefined | Better HN

0 pointsmappu4y ago0 comments

I think "smoother experience on FreeBSD" is a myth -

The standard volume manager on FreeBSD is vinum/geom; ZFS ships its entire separate volume manager to the host OS, so you can't use mount/umount to control mounting a ZFS volume. Maybe it would be okay to move entirely over to ZFS's volume manager but it only supports ZFS's own filesystem, you can't use the ZFS volume manager with a normal FreeBSD UFS2 partition.

In both Linux and FreeBSD, ZFS's bolt-on ARC competes with the kernel's actual page cache for resources instead of properly integrating with it.

It's an out-of-tree filesystem for both OSes. Sure FreeBSD periodically imports it into master from OpenZFS (née ZoL), but all development happens elsewhere, and the SPL is still trying to emulate a Solaris interface on top of both OSes.

Is there any more concrete example of how ZFS is actually better integrated on FreeBSD compared to Linux, say Ubuntu? It takes ZFS snapshots automatically during apt upgrades, root-on-ZFS is a default installer option, etc.

0 comments

laumars4y ago

Coincidentally there was a discussion about this yesterday. I agree with a lot of what was posted in it so might be easier to share that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27059551

This branch in particular addresses your points: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27062069

Has the latest version of Ubuntu finally made mirrored ZFS root pools painless? Because that was anything but a native out of the box experience (compared to setting up the same on FreeBSD) and that has bit me several times.

I've use ZFS on both FreeBSD and Linux for years and while Ubuntu is closing the gap, ZFS has been the default recommended file system on FreeBSD for close on 10 years already. So it's bound to feel more like a native experience on FreeBSD.

> In a review in DistroWatch, Jesse Smith detailed a number of problems found in testing this release, including boot issues, the decision to have Ubuntu Software only offer Snaps, which are few in number, slow, use a lot of memory and do not integrate well. He also criticized the ZFS file system for not working right and the lack of Flatpak support. He concluded, "these issues, along with the slow boot times and spotty wireless network access, gave me a very poor impression of Ubuntu 20.04. This was especially disappointing since just six months ago I had a positive experience with Xubuntu 19.10, which was also running on ZFS. My experience this week was frustrating - slow, buggy, and multiple components felt incomplete. This is, in my subjective opinion, a poor showing and a surprisingly unpolished one considering Canonical plans to support this release for the next five years."

This was Ubuntu's latest LTS release, which is less than a year old. Granted not all of the criticism levelled against it are ZFS related and granted that's just another persons anecdotal report but it mirror the same experiences everyone else, aside from yourself it seems, raises when switching between Linux and FreeBSD for ZFS storage.

I don't post this as a hater though. I, like others, do still run Ubuntu Server + ZFS for some systems (particularly where I wanted ZFS + Docker) and those systems do run well. But I can't deny that everything requires just a little more effort to get right on Linux because there isn't the assumption you're running ZFS where as on FreeBSD it more or less pre-configured to use ZFS right out of the box because that's the expectation. eg FreeBSD containers tooling is already written to support ZFS where as Linux container tooling isn't.

This is why people talk about a smoother experience on FreeBSD. The file system itself is the same code base and performs largely the same. But it's all the stuff around the edge that is built with the assumption of ZFS on FreeBSD that makes things feel a little less hacked together with duct tape.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse