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naturalmovement 2 hours ago

Stopped reading at "Debian".

Running ZFS on anything but Solaris/Illumos/FreeBSD is asinine.

ZFS is a permanent second-class citizen on Linux (due to usual open-source politics). This will never resolve.

I don't want to trust my data to some half-assed out-of-tree solution that may or may not break in a week.

FreeBSD ZFS support has matured and is outstanding. Quality-wise it has reached parity with Illumos.

If you can afford Solaris then you're probably not building your own NAS from parts of lesser computers.

ggm 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Run ZFS backed filestore on FreeBSD, have migrated it to/from Debian. At work and home, not petabyte scale but certainly multi hundred terrabyte. Over 15 years, on over 50 hosts/NAS/SAN instances, different hardware.

Run ZFS on Raspberry Pi, on home builds, on Intel, on AMD, on other ARM chipsets.

I think you're over-stating things. Debian is fine for this. I do think FreeBSD is a better platform for myself.

The code bases adhere (modulo ZFS version numbers) to a spec and you can safely migrate the pools between OS. I've done it multiple times both directions.

You can not do this with BTRFS and other Linux things, I consider this feature of (Open)ZFS a killer-context for me: It's OS portable. I wish Mac OSX hadn't walked out of the room when Oracle went legal.

gucci-on-fleek an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> You can not do this with BTRFS

There is actually a btrfs driver for Windows [0]. I've used it a few times before, and it works surprisingly well. You probably wouldn't want to use it for any serious work, but that's not because it's technically flawed, but more because it isn't extensively tested or commercially-supported.

[0]: https://github.com/maharmstone/btrfs

ggm an hour ago | parent [-]

There is Fuse support in BSD. I don't consider that a good choice for this role.

bpye an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I guess you can try Windows next - https://github.com/openzfsonwindows/openzfs

naturalmovement 38 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Sure you can migrate pools.

Yet everyone is (again) lost in the details and missing the big picture, which is Linux is doing its best to rat fuck OpenZFS at every opportunity, the last of which was the elimination of write_cache_pages in 6.18 behind the GPL iron curtain a mere few months ago.

I don't know about you but I don't want to build my file storage atop hacks on top of more hacks. The kernel has made it clear non-GPL code is not welcome. Struggles will continue in perpetuity. There are better options.

bpye 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If you run ZFS with an LTS kernel you're pretty much fine. Yes new Linux releases will break existing ZFS releases - but the LTS tree is in support for long enough that this is never an issue.

naturalmovement 30 minutes ago | parent [-]

Unless you need driver support only found in newer kernels. Then you are screwed.

Do I want my hardware to work or do I want to be able to read my files?

prmoustache 14 minutes ago | parent [-]

I am a BSD user yet I think this is largely irrelevant in the scope of a NAS which is the conversation we have here. Even in the cases bleeding edge hardware support is relevant, the latest Linux LTS kernel has probably wider hardware support than the freebsd-current at any given point in time anyway.

FreeBSD is a great choice, but there is no need to invent silly reasons to justify using it.

gucci-on-fleek 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Running ZFS on anything but Solaris/Illumos/FreeBSD is asinine.

> ZFS is a permanent second-class citizen on Linux

Linux is the primary target of OpenZFS [0] [1], and has been since 2020 [2]. It may not be supported by the Linux kernel developers, but it's supported by the ZFS developers, and that's all that really matters.

> I don't want to trust my data to some half-assed out-of-tree solution that may or may not break in a week.

Sure, it's an out-of-tree module, but that doesn't mean that it will randomly break all the time; it just means that you may occasionally need to wait for a new OpenZFS release before upgrading your kernel.

> FreeBSD ZFS support has matured and is outstanding.

Agreed, but Linux and FreeBSD both use the same ZFS [3], so I don't really see how the ZFS in FreeBSD can be better than the one in Linux. The tooling and install procedure is certainly better on FreeBSD, but the actual filesystem code is the same (and is probably slightly more robust on Linux since that's going to be where most of the testing occurs).

[0]: https://github.com/openzfs/zfs#supported-kernels-and-distrib...

[1]: https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/pull/8987

[2]: https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/releases/tag/zfs-2.0.0

[3]: https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/zfs/

nixgeek 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

And yet TrueNAS is moving away from BSD towards … Debian!

ZPrimed an hour ago | parent | next [-]

AFAIK this is because TrueNAS is trying to be all things to everyone, and they like Docker more than BSD jails.

klausa an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

You can use past tense there.