ZFS on Workstation

[thomas-hn]

Hello,

at the moment I am starting with planning my new workstation for my private daily use and I am wondering if ZFS would make sense on a workstation.
Here in the forum the experts often get hiccup if someone wants to use ZFS on non-24/7 machines, because of the scrubs, for example.

What do you think about using ZFS on a workstation?
If not using ZFS, how could be guaranteed that even the working copies of the data are okay?
If my server uses ZFS (TrueNAS) I would like to avoid that my workstation corrupts any data it accesses (for sure, with Snapshots you can go back, but in that case the work on the data since the snapshot was taken will be lost and you can only revert to a previous snapshot if you recognize the damaged data before you drop the snapshot somewhere in the future).

What are your thoughts? What file systems do you use on your workstations?

Thanks a lot in advance,

Thomas

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

What OS?

 

[thomas-hn]

What OS?

Good question, I forgot to mention this.
It will be some Linux distro (not sure at the moment which one it will be), could e.g. be Ubuntu.

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

I run every FreeBSD system including Notebooks and OPNsense firewalls on ZFS. Boot environments alone are well worth it.

If you intend to run Linux keep in mind that as far as I know Ubuntu's boot environment clone has been deprecated and GRUB is notoriously lagging behind in ZFS boot support so you need to be careful when to upgrade your boot pool - if at all.

Apart from that I don't see any downside.

 

[Ericloewe]

Ubuntu's boot environment clone has been deprecated

It never worked well. Very overengineered and with little real testing of the recovery options.

I've been using ZFS Boot Menu on all new systems, plus zrepl to automate the snapshots (and replication, where applicable) and haven't looked back. It just works, with the only asterisk being that there seems to be a race condition that is lost when booting a Linux kernel using the UEFI stub loader and prevents successful boot from LSI SAS3 HBAs. Easily fixable on servers and not a concern on workstations.

 

[thomas-hn]

Do you know any Linux distros that work well with ZFS out-of-the-box?

 

[Mlovelace]

Do you know any Linux distros that work well with ZFS out-of-the-box?

The distros listed here would be my short list to pick from. Personally I'd go with Debian 12, but to each their own.

 

[Ericloewe]

Most things that aren't RHEL seem to work fine these days. Ubuntu includes ZFS in the disto, which is a double-edged sword: it's there, but it's fairly rigidly locked into what they ship. For LTS versions, even over just two years, this can be annoying (point releases tend to be brought in, so it's about major versions). They have also not been great about handling the kernel vs. user land versions, in the past.

 

[Davvo]

I believe pros use a dedicated ZFS system for storage and MacOS/Windows in their production machines.

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

I believe pros use a dedicated ZFS system for storage and MacOS/Windows in their production machines.

Exactly. I do not like the fact that APFS does checksums only for metadata and not for my data proper, but my Mac is still the best desktop system I could wish for (or at least that is available now). All servers (>100) apart from about a dozen that run special applications and mandate Windows or Linux are FreeBSD and ZFS here. All developers work with Macs.

 

[Arwen]

I use ZFS on Linux, (Gentoo), for my home computers: desktop, miniature media server, old laptop and new laptop. None have ECC RAM, though I wish they did.

They all have 2 ZFS pools, limited Mirrored root and the remaining for a dumping ground. Plus, I have a separate "/boot" as EXT4 so in theory, I can run any ZFS feature I want, as long as the ZFS modules in the InitRD and root FS support that ZFS feature.

All use a custom alternate boot environment configuration, which works very well for my use. Also have snapshots on my home Dataset, so recovery of deleted file(s) is possible. It's a complicated snapshot scheme, but I am happy with it.

The ZFS scrubs are checked hourly, and run every 2 weeks. So, even with my laptop(s) off, when I finally do power one on, within 1 hour a scrub will be run if it's been 2 weeks since last one. Again, custom scripting that works well for me.


However, I can not recommend Gentoo Linux, as it is at times a pain to update. (It builds the packages from source.) At present, Gentoo works for me, though I have considered moving off, I have managed to solve some of my more annoying problems with Gentoo.

 

[Etorix]

I believe pros use a dedicated ZFS system for storage and MacOS/Windows in their production machines.

With OpenZFSonOSX being essentially a one-man operation, and OpenZFSonWindows being a side project of the same developer, that's understandable…

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

With OpenZFSonOSX being essentially a one-man operation

Oh - call me surprised. Seriously. I use ZFS on OS X for my external "data dump" USB devices.

 

[Arwen]

Hopefully OpenZFS on OSX & on MS-Windows will be added to the OpenZFS Linux & FreeBSD source tree.

Originally OpenZFS was using illumos as the head end. Then both FreeBSD & Linux would have to derive their source from that tree. Eventually it was determined that Linux was getting more attention & improvements, to the point that the head end, (and FreeBSD deriving from that head end), were having trouble keeping up.

So OpenZFS made Linux the main upstream source tree starting with version 2. And then iX and other FreeBSD developers assisted in merging in to this new upstream source. In the process, they attempted to make OS specific items more suitable for a multi-OS project. Except for OS specific things, OpenZFS on Linux and FreeBSD are the same.

Thus, it should be possible to merge in the illumos, MacOS and MS-Windows into that source tree, if not already done.

 

[Etorix]

Thus, it should be possible to merge in the illumos, MacOS and MS-Windows into that source tree, if not already done.

On one hand, O3X 2.2.2 is reportedly "fairly close to upstream".
On the other hand, there was this comment on Github:

Ultimately, I think you can proceed with Linux/FreeBSD changes. We've pretty much given up on merging macOS, and will plan to arrange our repo and workflow to be permanently down-stream, and have own copies of files for easier merging.

 

[Ericloewe]

Yeah, still not sure what that's about, ultimately.

My dream is still to see Microsoft adopt OpenZFS, because their crap solution sure isn't getting rave reviews and NTFS is just not enough in 2024.

 

[RadolBR]

I believe I saw somewhere that Microsoft was creating a new type of File System, I think it had something with "Resilient File System" (ReFS). But I didn't read deeply about it.