On Wed, May 09, 2012 at 07:07:51PM +0100, Lists wrote: > I'm looking at using ZFS for a box that will serve as a > storage/backup box. I'm aware of Debian/kFreeBSD, which seems to be > the best solution if I want to use Debian, but it does introduce > some limitations, so I haven't decided on it (yet). > > There are two solutions for linux: > > [1] zfs-fuse - http://zfs-fuse.net/ > [2] zfsonlinux - http://zfsonlinux.org/ > > Does anyone here have recent experience with both and can comment on > which they prefer and why?
Yes. I have experience with both. See http://pthree.org/?p=2357. ZFS for Linux 0.7.0 FUSE is using pool versions 23, which is quite old. Because it's using FUSE, it's not as performant as if it were kernel mainline, or a loaded module. Contrast that with ZFS for Linux http://zfsonlinux.org, which is a loadable kernel module, and it is also ZFS pool version 28, which is the latest source code that the Free Software community has access to until Oracle gets their act together, and delivers on their promise that they will release the source code after every Solaris release. I have used both, and the kernel module ZFS is superior. It is less buggy, more stable, and performs better than the FUSE counterpart. I've been using it for my backup servers and backup drives now for a couple months, and have not had any problems. I have a close friend who has been using it for a year or so, also with zero issues. In fact, if you use Time Slider with frequent snapshots, it becomes trivial to restore data should corruption occur. The biggest limitation is the lack of native encryption support, which was released in pool version 30, which we don't have access to the source. As a result, I've been using LUKS containers to put the RAID-Z pool in. If you have the AES instruction set on your CPU, then performance isn't really impacted. A word of caution: as tempting as deduplication might be, avoid it. Unless you have significant RAM, and a fast RAID-0 SSD ZIL, I would advise against it. It causes massive performance problems, and the benefit isn't worth the cost. On the other hand, enabling compression is very much worth it. LZJB is fast, and massive gains can be achieved with little effort. Just my two-cents. -- . o . o . o . . o o . . . o . . . o . o o o . o . o o . . o o o o . o . . o o o o . o o o
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