New New ZFS on root with Ubuntu 19.10 daily

Just read the Ars article

and if one goes Real cutting edge, it seems ZFS might be an option in a daily build of Ubuntu.

I know some people have run this springs to mind:

ZFS on root

But I still haven’t tried it.

I know sgtawesomesauce has done it, and I know a few others have.

Would it be better having it in an installer, like Canonacle seem to want, or is it easy enough to roll oneself that it doesn’t really need it?

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@AnotherDev wanna see if this is as hard to install as other ZoL stuff?

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Lol maybe one day. Not tonight, though.

Good on Ubuntu for still being the best Linux distro, though.

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I’m going to be doing some testing on it soon.

I’ll let you know.

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It would be absolutely better to have it on an installer.

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ftfy :wink:

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Nice. I have been doing some web server and game dev stuff so I don’t have all my VMs and stuff setup yet.

But Soon™

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Will give it a shot when 1910 is released.

If Ubuntu are willing to do the legwork to make sure that any breakage between the kernel and ZFS is handled by their devs prior to patches going into the base OS then for me it’s a no brainer.

I have held off on ZoL thus far due to concern with the above.

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That’s why I’ve held off on it for root.

For data, it’s fine.

Antergos shipped a builtin ZFS with their kernel for their ZFS on Root config. It worked well 99.5% of the time.

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Thing is that there’s a huge benefit running ZFS on root (which is nothing to do with most of the other cool ZFS features)…

Those who don’t follow BSD should check out FreeBSD and BEADM.

https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=beadm

The TLDR version is that you can boot from a ZFS clone (which is basically a set of block pointers to an existing snapshot - thus take almost no space until modified) of a ZFS snapshot.

Upgrades become risk free. Rollback is painless. No virtualisation required… you get snapshot rollback on real hardware :slight_smile:

edit:
better described here

If ubuntu start to support root on ZFS, you can be sure that boot environment support via GRUB surely can’t be far behind.

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bectl(8) is the new hotness in FreeBSD though :wink:

I was about to install Debian on a machine for some ZoL development but perhaps I’ll give Ubuntu 19.10 a try instead. It’s probably a better idea to use a stable OS on the machine and develop in VMs anyway, that plan was only half baked.

Edit: bugger, the ZFS installer for Ubuntu isn’t available for another 5 days! I installed Debian as originally planned in the meantime.
Edit again: Read TFA, it’s available in the daily builds.

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I am not sure how “new” any of this stuff is…
I had it briefly installed on Fedora, and you have to rebuild the driver for every kernel upgrade which takes some time.
I believe this is based off of the zfs from opensolaris, which was at zpool level 28. I have access to Solaris 11 servers and they are at pool version 44 or so?

I would definitely love to run it on linux if there were better support!

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It’s version 5000. Development of ZFS continued outside of Oracle after the acquisition, and ZFS on Linux is becoming the central repo for OpenZFS development.

Ubuntu having better support for ZFS out of the box is exactly the hype

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Thats a ccdl/gpl issue. :confused:

They get around the license incompatibility by not “shipping” the packages together. Ubuntu just says fuck you to the licensing.

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Far out. I never I have a freebsd vm and an illumnos vm, and have never noticed the “feature” list above the pool versions in a zpool upgrade -v… That is cool!

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Yeah cddl and Fedora… So we have a hinky zfs repo installed for zfs to keep it “separate” and it builds a kernel module via the dkms frame work for every kernel update… Be nice if some 3rd party packager would at least build the module and package, like rpmfusion… yo well, score one for ubuntu!

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Iirc, it requires linking against the specific headers, so that’s why you can’t use pre-built modules unless you know the kernel version exactly.

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thanks!

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Yea unlike userland interfaces, Linux loves to change kernel interfaces and break things.

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