Deep Diving into the Strengths of FreeBSD

Re:Deep Diving into the Strengths of FreeBSD by sirn on Thursday May 06, 2021 @04:51AM (#27060638)

I hosted my coding environment on a VPS running FreeBSD and happen to jump between VPS provider quite a bit due to location and pricing. My migration method was simply:

    $ zfs snapshot zroot/home@migrate
    $ zfs send -R zroot/home@migrate | ssh newhost zfs recv zroot/home

ZFS automatic snapshots (via zfstools[1]) can also saved hours of headaches trying to recover an older version of a file. Since snapshot appears as a regular mount (ZFS even automatically expose them under /path/to/mount/.zfs/snapshot), all existing tooling just works (cp, cat, running diff against snapshot, etc.).

My Linux machine these days also runs ZFS, but the level of integration with the system is still far from that of FreeBSD's. That can range from something as simple as ZFS ARC stats in top, to native support for ZFS Boot Environment allowing the system to boot directly from snapshots or do an offline upgrade of a clone of a live system[2]. (On Linux side of things there's zfsbootmenu[3] which provides something similar but the project is still quite new.)

The filesystem may not matter that much, and I'm sure many these features can be replicated with LVM, but having a unified tooling and community around it really makes quite a difference in quality of life as an end-user.

[1]: https://github.com/bdrewery/zfstools

[2]: https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2021/02/23/upgrade-freebsd-wi...

[3]: https://zfsbootmenu.org/

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Re:Deep Diving into the Strengths of FreeBSD by Sukera on Thursday May 06, 2021 @06:28AM (#27061236)

Not sure if it's still relevant (article is quite old after all), but does [1] still hold true in regards to /boot on ZFS on linux, even with zfsbootmenu? What kind of issues can I expect? Is there a newer/better knowledgebase compared to the one on pthree.org?

I'm guessing the newness/missing features of zfsbootmenu is in regards to beadm [2]?

[1] https://pthree.org/2013/01/03/zfs-administration-part-xvii-b... [2] https://vermaden.files.wordpress.com/2018/11/nluug-zfs-boot-...

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Re:Deep Diving into the Strengths of FreeBSD by sirn on Thursday May 06, 2021 @07:15AM (#27061548)

GRUB2 works fine with /boot on ZFS, however GRUB cannot detect ZFS dataset with native ZFS encryption (see bug[1]). The best KB right now is probably OpenZFS documentation[2] and Arch Wiki[3].

I've been using ZBM since its inclusion in void-packages. It already does everything I wanted it to, but I don't think its usage is widespread outside Void Linux community just yet. Being dependent on Dracut might be one of the reason why (I believe Arch is still using mkinitcpio). There's installation instruction for Void and Debian Buster on ZBM GitHub[4]. I used to have a separate ZBM root for void-musl and void-glibc which worked quite well (though I'm now running only void-glibc due to Nvidia).

[1]: https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?func=detailitem&item_id=58270

[2]: https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/Getting%20Started/ind...

[3]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Install_Arch_Linux_on_ZFS

[4]: https://github.com/zbm-dev/zfsbootmenu/wiki

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Re:Deep Diving into the Strengths of FreeBSD by stiray on Thursday May 06, 2021 @09:17AM (#27062749)

Well I am running Ubuntu 20.04 and have experienced boot issues after update multiple times. Currently my laptop is not directly bootable as zpools are imported in wrong order / not imported at all so I have to import them manually. As there is not enough information how the freaking boot works and I am not prepared to study grub2 to figure it out and I am in this situation for 6 months.

This is my last root ZFS install on linux.

I had problems with fedora before (where at least ZFS wasnt supported and I was expecting problems), I am having problems with Ubuntu now and I never had any issues with zfs root on FreeBSD in ~15 years.

I am sick of distributions "moving fast and breaking things" on my back.

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Re:Deep Diving into the Strengths of FreeBSD by Rompect on Thursday May 06, 2021 @06:10AM (#27061128)

How do ZFS snapshots compare to LVM snapshots? Question not specifically for, but anyone who might know something about this.

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Re:Deep Diving into the Strengths of FreeBSD by throw0101a on Thursday May 06, 2021 @07:47AM (#27061813)

Night and day. I hardly hear of anyone using LVM snapshots except in special cases, but ZFS snapshots for many people are like brushing one's teeth: a habit that is done multiple times a day.

Using them for system updates/upgrades is built right into FreeBSD (copying a feature from Solaris):

* https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?beadm

If the changes fail just rollback the system to the previous state/snapshot (including kernel changes) via the boot loader.

Services like rsync.net allow one to have offsite backups with easy, and the destination can be encrypted such that the remote end can't see your data. All through an SSH pipe.

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Re:Deep Diving into the Strengths of FreeBSD by danuker on Thursday May 06, 2021 @05:14AM (#27060794)

Do you use Linux as a daily driver?

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Re:Deep Diving into the Strengths of FreeBSD by sirn on Thursday May 06, 2021 @05:23AM (#27060853)

I used Linux as a daily driver until the end of 2020 (Void Linux + ZFS + ZBM), but now running M1 Mac as a primary machine. I'm still using Linux regularly though (gaming via Proton, which is why I'm not running FreeBSD on a desktop yet).

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