ZFS as a file system option during Rasperry Pi 4 setup

mwgary

mwgary

I have a nice little FreeBSD 13.1 setup on my Raspberry Pi 4, that is very stable and working nicely. However, I wondered why there isn't a media image option for a ZFS file system, instead of UFS. Obvious reasons for wanting this is system recovery after power loss, or crash. I've always recovered quickly with ZFS on my PC, obviously. But UFS, pain the in the backside.

Anyway, its just an observation. It may well pop up in future releases as an option (I hope!)

Mark
 
I have, on system crash, and it wont recover, at least easily. Never any issue with ZFS.
 
Alain De Vos said:
zfs uses alot of memory&cpu which raspberryPi4 does not have.
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I take that point. But with the Pi now at min 4gb and with ability push cpu to reasonable speed. it would sort of make sense to offer it as an alternative install image. Maybe for the next Pi, whenever that is.
 
Alain De Vos said:
zfs uses alot of memory
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ZFS likes memory, that's true. But it'll work just fine without it. Not the fastest but it'll work nonetheless. I've used ZFS on systems with only 4GB, so why would a 4GB Pi not be adequate?

Alain De Vos said:
cpu which raspberryPi4 does not have.
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ZFS doesn't use that much CPU. Maybe if you turn up the compression really high it'll consume more CPU. But the default lz4 compression is quite efficient. And you could always turn compression off completely.
 
Suggested doesn't mean required. You're not going to win any benchmark tests with 4GB, but you're not going to win those with only 8GB either. But it will still work.
 
I use ZFS on pretty old laptop with 1G RAM. HERE you can see that ZFS can be tuned to use less RAM. I read somewhere that ZFS is not recommended on flash storage, don't know why.

Also, when FreeBSD 10.3 came out i had issues with power failures, everytime my system turned off forcibly i was left without data(with UFS), even after fsck.
 
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