Re:OpenZFS launch
by insaneirish on Tuesday September 17, 2013 @03:21PM
(#6401278)
> For example, if you want to do something software raid-ish, ZFS has the philosophy that should be done at the filesystem layer, not as a virtual device like every other linux filesystem, ever.
Not exactly true. RAID and mirroring logically sit at the zpool layer, and therefore anything on top of a given zpool has the zpool's RAID/mirror characteristics. This may be a filesystem, but it could also mean a zvol too. A zvol would be analogous to your /dev/md0 block device in that you could put a FAT32 filesystem on top of a zvol and still benefit from the underlying redundancy, parity, and checksumming features of ZFS.
Addendum: Strictly speaking, redundancy (RAID or mirror) configuration is on a vdev, and a zpool is comprised of one or more vdevs over which data is striped.
Not exactly true. RAID and mirroring logically sit at the zpool layer, and therefore anything on top of a given zpool has the zpool's RAID/mirror characteristics. This may be a filesystem, but it could also mean a zvol too. A zvol would be analogous to your /dev/md0 block device in that you could put a FAT32 filesystem on top of a zvol and still benefit from the underlying redundancy, parity, and checksumming features of ZFS.
Addendum: Strictly speaking, redundancy (RAID or mirror) configuration is on a vdev, and a zpool is comprised of one or more vdevs over which data is striped.