Re:A detailed look at Ubuntu’s new experimental ZFS installer
by lathiat on Tuesday October 15, 2019 @09:21PM
(#21266089)
They finally added this to Oracle Solaris ('closed source' zfs) in 11.4 (http://blog.moellenkamp.org/archives/50-How-to-remove-a-top-...)
And there is work on it for OpenZFS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Njt82e_3qVo
for zfsonlinux As far as I understand you can currently add and remove striped/mirror devices, but you cannot remove raid-z vdevs (ref: https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/issues/9129) - so there is definitely work left to be done in this area.
as an aside mdadm has surprisingly fantastic features in this area and can reshape pretty much any array type to any other. i was impressed by that.
I loved the flexibility of BTRFS in this regard - you could change the duplication level at any point. BTRFS seemed to abstract the storage away beautifully - just give us your drives, any combination of sizes, tell us how many copies of your data you want to keep and we'll handle the rest. It wasn't perfect, but I loved this approach, and I feel like it could go even further, eg. calculate risk of failure probabilities and then just tell it how low you want your risk. If it can't do it with your current drive capacities it could tell you what it needs to accomplish it, and then rebalance the data once you add the drives. Got an SSD? Throw it in the pool and let it optimize for cacheing. I know bcachefs has that particular aspect covered, but there's a lot of other basic features that still need to be implemented.