[Cialug] ZFS on Debian

[Matt Stanton]

Ooh!  That's neat.  I've disliked the few experiences I've had with BSD/Solaris, mainly because I'm so used to GNU/Linux.  Does Debian/BSD give you the GNU experience on a BSD kernel (aside from changes like, maybe pf is used rather than iptables)?

Anyway, the way I understand it, the original way to use ZFS on Linux was to use it via FUSE.  ZFS has a license that doesn't allow it to be distributed with the Linux kernel (or the other way around), so if you want to use ZFS without FUSE, you have to download and build it as a module separately from the kernel.  There are PPAs for the ZFS kernel module for recent versions of Ubuntu, along with packages for other distros.  Apparently ZFS uses virtual addressing because it is very efficient in Solaris.  With Linux, most memory is physically addressed, and virtual addressing is strongly discouraged.  The default virtual address space in 32-bit Linux is very small, making ZFS extremely unstable.  Even if you raise that size with a boot option, it still remains somewhat unstable.  64-bit versions of Linux can use ZFS in a stable fashion, and work is being carried out to recode ZFS such that it doesn't use virtual address space on Linux...  I just wonder if ZFS isn't as efficient on Linux as it is on the BSDs and Solaris- or Illumos-based OSes.

This Debian/BSD setup is really interesting, though, if it gives you a GNU/Linux-like experience on the BSD kernel.  ZFS still wouldn't be as efficient as it is on the Solaris/Illumos OSes, but it would have to be better than ZFS on Linux is at this point.

* most of what I know about ZFS on Linux comes, quite appropriately, from http://zfsonlinux.org/faq.html

-- Matt

Sent from my ASUS Transformer



-----Original Message-----
From: Theron Conrey <theron at conrey.org>
To: Central Iowa Linux Users Group <cialug at cialug.org>
Sent: Fri, 24 Aug 2012 7:05 PM
Subject: Re: [Cialug] ZFS on Debian

Debian has a FreeBSD kernel available now as well you can use.  It works great if you like the Debian packaging and want to use ZFS.
-Theron


On Aug 25, 2012, at 4:10 AM, David Champion wrote:

> I'm using it on FreeNAS (FreeBSD), and it has been working very well.
> 
> Are you building a storage device, or wanting to use ZFS for a
> general-purpose server?
> 
> -dc
> 
> On Fri, Aug 24, 2012 at 1:17 PM, Nathan C. Smith <nathan.smith at ipmvs.com>wrote:
> 
>> Hi all,
>> 
>> ZFS newbie here.
>> 
>> Has anybody used ZFS on Debian?  I'm interested in using it and the
>> information I found so far seems a little sketchy.  Any tips, warnings,
>> pointers, rules of thumb, etc. would be welcome.
>> 
>> Thanks
>> 
>> -Nate
>> 
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