Poor man's ZFS

[thro]

How?

ZFS works with varying disk configurations, BTRFS only works reliably with mirrors or single drives.

ZFS has send/receive, built in support for inline de-duplication and compression, is cross platform and battle tested. It has built in logical volume management.

What’s one single reason to use BTRFS, when ZFS is available?

[CookiesAreAmazing]

This thread is about making something similar to ZFS using other components available in the Linux kernel.

Nobody here is looking for advice of what they should use on their laptop. I think your issues with Btrfs should be discussed in another thread.

[CookiesAreAmazing]

@starshipeleven

Btw i just remembered that RedHat is trying to do a similar thing to what you are attempting with the Stratis project. They have been working at it for like 10 years and i have no idea what % of feature parity they are at, but it is still going https://www.phoronix.com/news/Stratis-Storage-3.9-Released

Interesting, but I still need to learn more about it and try it out.

@starshipeleven

This is imho comparable to having a LUKS volume inside a LVM.

Hm, well, I had hoped ZFS is encrypting much more information about the dataset, seems like it would not pass data safety requirements in many places. However, it seems to be fine if all you store in that dataset is VM images(?)

[xzpfzxds]

@CookiesAreAmazing

Hm, well, I had hoped ZFS is encrypting much more information about the dataset, seems like it would not pass data safety requirements in many places. However, it seems to be fine if all you store in that dataset is VM images(?)

Don’t put sensitive data / PII / SPII in metadata to begin with. If you cannot guarentee that then you can put ZFS on dm-crypt. dm-crypt has FUA command passthrough so it’s safe for ZFS.