OpenZFS on Linux v0.8.1 released. Thoughts?

Anyone have thoughts or experience with ZoL in a practical sense, or simply some feedback for a novice? Debian family stuff continues to be my preference and comfort zone, just curious what the experts have to think about this promising project.

I dabbled with FreeNAS briefly, but was sort of turned off by the pitchfork and torch waving community and ultimately ended up reprovisioning my intended HP Z420 FreeNAS box into a second hypervisor / compute host and haven’t looked back since. I respect their passion and dedication, but it’s difficult for a beginner to break through that glass ceiling.

TL;DR – This incremental release was primarily bug fixes.

My apologies in advance if I’ve inadvertently pressed any buttons, my goal here is to simply engage in a dialogue, hopefully learn a few things in the process. Thanks to @wendell and @ryan for the outstanding community.

So are we talking about BSD, Hypervisor’s / Virtualization, or ZFS on Linux?

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Others have been using ZoL successfully, but personally, I’m holding off until .8 hits Ubuntu. I just don’t trust something as complex and critical as ZFS without native support. And versions <.8 were missing some features (TRIM).

That said, I am excited to see FreeBSD rebase on ZoL and I think ZFS as a whole will benefit greatly from that consolidation. Might give FreeNAS 12 a few more months than usual to work through issues before I adopt though.

The latter. My apologies for the lack of clarity.

I’ve been running zol for years. Never lost data.

My only complaint is how the drivers are built for the kernel, at least under Fedora.

Anytime the zfs or kernel package upgrades I reboot to a broken system. Easy enough to fix with the dkms install script but still a bummer. This has been going on since F24, before that it worked pretty easy.

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It’s fine. I use it at home, and for clients. I usually set them up on Proxmox so that their VMs can be replicated off site. It’s super nice.

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