Re: Anyone Using OpenZFS?

On 1/10/25 13:48, Farley Flud wrote:

I hear a lot about the virtues of OpenZFS, which is available for GNU/Linux albeit, due to license concerns, only in a roundabout way.

I'm fairly certain that FreeBSD has also been using OpenZFS for the last 3-8 years.

A separate external module must be compiled and then added to the kernel.

I believe I've seen directions on how to integrate that external module into a kernel that doesn't support modules.  Some sort of way to graft it into the kernel tree so you don't need modules.  I think.

Since my programming predilection is HPC/scientific/engineering, I know little about disk I/O concepts.  So answer these questions if you are able.
 Is OpenZFS suitable/recommended for a desktop workstation?

I see no reason to not use (Open)ZFS on a desktop workstation.

What are the benefits of OpenZFS compared to EXT4?

I think that (Open)ZFS's flexibility and capabilities put it in a completely different (IMHO better) class than Ext4.
  - snapshots
  - clones
  - send & receive
  - RAID like capabilities
  - (logical) volume management
  - data protection in addition to metadata.

Is OpenZFS stable enough to be trusted?

I've been using (Open)ZFS to manage millions of files for more than 10 years.  I'm very happy with it.

I will appreciate all responses.

The only thing that I will say is that (Open)ZFS is not as fast as a raw file system like Ext4.  But I believe that the minor performance penalty is well worth it for snapshots and send & receive.
--
Grant. . . .