[Discuss] Debian 11 -> 12

[slitt at troubleshooters.com (Steve Litt)]

Rich Pieri said on Thu, 30 May 2024 15:08:58 -0400

>On Thu, 30 May 2024 10:15:18 -0700
>Kent Borg <kentborg at borg.org> wrote:
>
>> I would amend that: Any new deployment?that is conventional (from
>> ZFS's perspective) and can afford the necessary expertise.  
>
>While ZFS's *syntax* is different from say LVM + ext4, in *practice*
>it's quite simpler:
>
>zpool create tank /dev/sda /dev/sdb...
>zfs create tank/mydata
>
>vs
>
>gdisk /dev/sda, create partition; repeat with /dev/sdb...
>pvcreate /dev/sda1; repeat with /dev/sdb1...
>vgcreate volumegroup /dev/sda /dev/sdb...
>lvcreate -L size volumegroup logicalvol
>mkfs.ext4 /dev/mapper/volumegroup-logicalvol
>mkdir /mountpoint
>edit fstab
>mount /mountpoint
>
>Want to change a mountpoint?
>
>zfs set mountpoint=/path/to/mydata zpool/mydata
>
>and now mydata is mounted as /path/to/mydata instead of /zpool/mydata.
>
>Want compression? Simple:
>
>zfs set compression=on pool/dataset
>
>Can't do that with the commonly used filesystems (ext2 has a simple
>compression mechanism but it's clunky and to my knowledge was never
>forward ported to ext3 and ext4). That's the default algorithm there by
>the way, but there are others which balance performance and
>compression.
>
>Want encryption on your dataset?
>
>zfs create -o encryption=on -o keylocation=prompt \
>-o keyformat=passphrase pool/dataset
>
>for a simple example, and you'd import this after reboot with
>
>zpool import pool -l
>
>'-l' tells zpool to request encryption keys for encrypted datasets.
>Doing anything even vaguely similar with LVM + anything else, or just
>anything else, requires mucking around with cryptsetup and loopback
>devices.
>
>
>> matter of taste, I found it ornery. And it flat out *crashed* when I
>> tried to do the same stuff on a Raspberry PI 4. I was certainly
>> doing  
>
>And as I have noted in the past, SD cards are inherently flakey.
>
>Your Pi itself might be flakey. Or overheating. Or power management is
>set wrong. Or insufficient power. Or any number of possible root causes
>which aren't ZFS itself.
>
>
>> As far as I can tell ZFS is a specialized tool, with impressive 
>> features, but rough edges. It is not a smoothly crafted, general
>> purpose package suited to a general audience.  
>
>I almost agree on a technicality: ZFS was not designed for a "general
>audience". It was designed to be the last word -- or at least the last
>letter, "Z" -- in enterprise scalability and performance. But it just
>so happens to be really good at smaller scales, too. Better than almost
>anything else I've used, but I have a fondness for Digital's AdvFS for
>OSF/1 aka Tru64 Unix and there may be nostalgia goggles in the way.

Rich, after reading this, for the first time I'm thinking of trying
zfs. You did a good job listing its benefits.

SteveT

Steve Litt 

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