ZFS in 9.0

Kerrnel

Has anyone stressed ZFS in 9.0? Seems quite stable albeit a bit slow to delete (e.g. obj directories).

JuvenalUrbino

Kerrnel I'm keeping a separate HDD for storage as a full-disk ZFS pool, and yes it's pretty stable XD. I must say I haven't noticed a performance drop compared to FreeBSD ZFS, but I'll reckon I haven't stressed it either 😉

stratact

JuvenalUrbino I have a quick question. How easy would it be to reuse and import a zpool from FreeBSD and to use as storage? IIRC, there is no zfs-on-root for NetBSD and that's fine, I just want to mount it elsewhere.

JuvenalUrbino

stratact

stratact I have a quick question. How easy would it be to reuse and import a zpool from FreeBSD and to use as storage

AFAIK It's not possible at the moment, as NetBSD's ZFS is basically the vanilla OpenZFS which up until very recently consisted of the Delphix/Illumos implementation; FreeBSD on the other hand applied several homegrown, not upstreamed patches over the years, and others merged from ZoL...hence, sadly, even on 11.x/12.0, where FreeBSD's ZFS had not been rebased over ZoL yet, the 2 implementations are not compatible with one another.

We should wait for NetBSD to move to ZoL, and I expect this to become a reality in a near future, considering now ZoL is the official main branch and that all projects seem determined to cooperate thus to achieve the so -long awaited cross-compatibility.

JuvenalUrbino

stratact there is no zfs-on-root for NetBSD

(I suspect the solution for zfs-on-root on NetBSD to be as easy as creating a prekern like the one for KASLR-enabled kernels)

stratact

JuvenalUrbino

JuvenalUrbino AFAIK It's not possible at the moment, as NetBSD's ZFS is basically the vanilla OpenZFS which up until very recently consisted of the Delphix/Illumos implementation; FreeBSD on the other hand applied several homegrown, not upstreamed patches over the years, and others merged from ZoL...hence, sadly, even on 11.x/12.0, where FreeBSD's ZFS had not been rebased over ZoL yet, the 2 implementations are not compatible with one another.

We should wait for NetBSD to move to ZoL, and I expect this to become a reality in a near future, considering now ZoL is the official main branch and that all projects seem determined to cooperate thus to achieve the so -long awaited cross-compatibility.

I see. Thank you. I think what I could do by the time I switch to NetBSD for my workstations, is plan a backup strategy for migrating files to a brand new NetBSD zpool. It would be more work but at least I would guarantee zpool feature compatibility.

Kerrnel

One has to ensure the features available are chosen from the minimum subset when creating the zpool. NetBSD < FreeBSD < Linux in terms of feature flags (snapshot latest stable builds Debian, FreeBSD, NetBSD 9) ... so create on the lowest system or turn off the features when creating on a higher ZFS featured system and the pool can be moved. (Have verified FreeBSD <-> Linux ... not yet NetBSD.)

zpool create -o feature@${i}=disabled ...

tpaul

I've noticed that deleting files on ZFS has been very slow as well and have read somewhere (sorry can't recall where) that deleting files on ZFS is an expensive operation. I've worked around the issue using zfs snapshot and zfs rollback and that has worked well for my specific use case where I needed to lots of delete operations. I've been using a simple mirror with 2 disks and it has been very stable.