I would say comparable. I actually switched to ZFS a few years ago. The one downside I have with ZFS is how much RAM it uses. With my capacity I usually need 32GB or more and usually ECC RAM. You can do ZFS without ECC but if you are concerned about data integrity, ECC is a must.
For anyone setting up a cached logical volume in Debian or Debian-based distribution, you may encounter issues after rebooting your system whether you’ve mounted the LV or not.
The Problem
For those who’ve mounted their cached LV, your system may not even reboot into the operating system. For those who have yet to mount their cached LV, the system will reboot into the operating system but the volume group on which the LV resides will be deactivated and will require a manual activation with the following command:
vgchange -a y <name-of-volume-group>
You can verify activation (or deactivation) with the following command:
lvscan
Possible Solution
When you manually activate the volume group, you may encounter a warning message that led me to finding the appropriate solution:
/usr/sbin/cache_check: execvp failed: No such file or directory WARNING: Check is skipped, please install recommended missing binary /usr/sbin/cache_check!
The cause of this message is a missing package that is officially considered optional to the LVM2 installation. In order for cached LVs to function properly, the thin-provisioning-tools package is necessary.
I found this information in a Debian bug report that lists the solution along with a discussion which seems to have been ignored by the maintainer of LVM:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=773731
My cached LV is set up in Linux Mint 22 and to install the package I simply entered the following command:
apt install thin-provisioning-tools
But to perform a manual install, the package is hosted by the following GitHub repository here:
After installing the package, the volume group along with the cached logical volume function as normal and automatically activate when booting into the OS. In addition, I also confirmed that the cached logical volume can have its filesystem configured and be mounted (listed in fstab) without issue upon reboot.
The volume group, cached logical volume, and mountpoint persists between reboots.
1 Like