Is ZFS good for Desktop use with FreeBSD

mfaridi · Feb 22, 2011

I want change to FreeBSD 8.2 after release, I use FreeBSD with Gnome always and I use it for Desktop use, Is this a good idea, I format my Hard Disk with ZFS and do not use UFS2 default file system of FreeBSD? I have 3GB of RAM.

gordon@ · Feb 22, 2011

ZFS is great for dealing with lots of drives and having large data sets. If you are going to have one or two hard drives, I would really recommend sticking with UFS2.

mfaridi · Feb 22, 2011

I have only one Hard Disk

graudeejs · Feb 22, 2011

Works fine on my laptop as well

mfaridi · Feb 22, 2011

Very important thing is for me copy and paste speed, because I have to every day copy many files specially big files like 4.7 GB files from my system to another system or USB stick. I think ZFS is not good, because I see some where speed copy is slow than UFS.

oliverh · Feb 22, 2011

Well, it's overkill for most situations and it can be a resource hog, especially while really using it. Apart from that UFS is a mature and rock-stable filesystem, used on many server-farms. So it's up to you, ZFS is stable but far from rock-stable. You shouldn't mistake geeky interests with needs of a productive environment. Ask the same question on the mailinglist, to get more useful answers.

rusty · Feb 22, 2011

I use OpenIndiana on my workstation (full ZFS) and FreeBSD on my desktop (UFS + ZFS), one thing I find very useful is the timeslider feature in OpenIndiana - http://blogs.sun.com/erwann/entry/zfs_on_the_desktop_zfs
Video if you prefer - http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7oe8l_time-slider-screencast_tech

While we don't have time-slider on FreeBSD the snapshotting is still very useful plus being able to create filesystems and set compression, exec, setuid, copies etc on the fly make ZFS very nice to work with.

mfaridi said:
I think ZFS is not good , because I see some where speed copy is slow than UFS

If speed was the only important thing then we should be using ext2

vermaden · Feb 22, 2011

rusty said:
one thing I find very useful is the timeslider feature

That's one of several things I miss on FreeBSD after trying out OpenSolaris (at that time), the other one is Boot Environments and setting up WiFi using dladm [*].

[*]

[CMD=""]% pfexec dladm scan-wifi[/CMD]
[CMD=""]% pfexec dladm create-secobj -c wpa network.key[/CMD]
[CMD=""]% (...)[/CMD]

... instead of editing/changing /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf with sed, I do not feel very comfortable keeping passwords in plain text there

danbi · Feb 23, 2011

If you care about your data, you should use ZFS. It is that simple.

ZFS is fast enough, sometimes faster than UFS. It may be 'slow' on slow (really old) hardware, especially if you enable things like filesystem compression. I guess UFS will be as slow there, or slower, if it ever supported such options. ZFS is certainly faster than any USB flash stick!

ZFS requires memory for decent performance, but it can be tuned to use less memory and still be fast. In a typical desktop, way more memory is wasted for other things.
On very memory restrained systems, say 64MB RAM, you will always be better with UFS of course.

Curiously, ZFS on USB stick is way faster than UFS, if you do anything different that copy single large file to the flash media.

I have switched my desktop to ZFS about a year ago and as a rule, all of the FreeBSD systems I build since then, servers or workstations are ZFS-only.

gordon@ · Feb 23, 2011

danbi said:
If you care about your data, you should use ZFS. It is that simple.

I'm curious where this assertion comes from. Is using UFS somehow being careless with your data? UFS has been around a very long time and is well vetted.

gkontos · Feb 23, 2011

Personally I like UFS and compared with the linux FS competition it rocks. (I am not trying to start a flame war here) But given the horsepower that most modern desktops have, I choose ZFS. I like the features that ZFS offers and because I play alot with my desktop I tend to screw things up eventually. ZFS snapshots let me rollback very easy. Also, I never regard my desktops data as valuable. All valuable data are located in my ZFS file server and backuped regularly.

George

Galactic_Dominator · Feb 24, 2011

gordon@ said:
I'm curious where this assertion comes from. Is using UFS somehow being careless with your data? UFS has been around a very long time and is well vetted.

UFS also has well known (and rare) data loss issues. I've seen more than one corrupted UFS, and usually dealing with it isn't pretty. Of course ZFS has issues of its own and it's not suitable for every scenario, but as long as your using hardware that obeys cache flush commands and doesn't lie about its result you're pretty safe on either file system. Whatever you chose, you should have backups.

Also I would much rather run a ZFS mirror than gmirror. I'm not putting down gmirror, it's a great utility, but if I have a chance to run ZFS mirror instead I would take it no matter if it's a desktop or server or whatever.

nestux · Feb 24, 2011

I use ZFS and I love it, is a very good file system. Feels much better than ext3 to me when I use Linux.

oliverh · Feb 24, 2011

danbi said:
If you care about your data, you should use ZFS. It is that simple.

ZFS is fast enough, sometimes faster than UFS. It may be 'slow' on slow (really old) hardware, especially if you enable things like filesystem compression. I guess UFS will be as slow there, or slower, if it ever supported such options. ZFS is certainly faster than any USB flash stick!

ZFS requires memory for decent performance, but it can be tuned to use less memory and still be fast. In a typical desktop, way more memory is wasted for other things.
On very memory restrained systems, say 64MB RAM, you will always be better with UFS of course.

Curiously, ZFS on USB stick is way faster than UFS, if you do anything different that copy single large file to the flash media.

I have switched my desktop to ZFS about a year ago and as a rule, all of the FreeBSD systems I build since then, servers or workstations are ZFS-only.

I'm a strong supporter of FreeBSD since several years, but if I want to use ZFS and value my data, then Solaris is a must. But even there ZFS has some known teething problems. And if UFS is "too slow", then you have to tune it or look for some bottlenecks in your hardware configuration. The defaults are somewhat conservative. ZFS isn't made for the desktop, it's made for datacenters. What we need for the future is some filesystem "in between", something with more features but which is less a resource hog than ZFS. Apart from that, I don't think there is an open source future for ZFS, but that's a different story.

gkontos · Feb 24, 2011

oliverh said:
What we need for the future is some filesystem "in between", something with more features but which is less a resource hog than ZFS.

UFS SoftUpdates+Journal maybe ?

oliverh said:
Apart from that, I don't think there is an open source future for ZFS, but that's a different story.

Ouch! :e I would really like to hear why because I am a strong ZFS supporter.

danbi · Feb 25, 2011

UFS is an fine filesystem and before ZFS it was the best we could have.

However, UFS lacks any form of data validation. Where UFS is stable, because it has gone trough so many testing and evaluation, ZFS is stable by design -- ZFS detects when things go wrong and 'heals' itself, for both metadata and user data. As such it is designed to work reliably over flaky infrastructure. Which is what most complex systems are anyway. It will also immediately make obvious that your hardware/setup is bad.

ZFS in FreeBSD is sufficiently stable. In some aspects it's better than the Solaris implementation (of the same version). Of course, ZFS in Solaris is as of now, better integrated but this is improving with FreeBSD, whereas it's not known how things (will) move on the Solaris implementation.

Also, ZFS has many things to tune it's performance. It can be tuned for desktop usage, will very good results. There is no need to invent yet another filesystem. This is not Linux

By the way, datacenters usually use much less flaky hardware. In contrast with the typical desktop.

oliverh · Feb 26, 2011

gkontos said:
UFS SoftUpdates+Journal maybe ?

Ouch! :e I would really like to hear why because I am a strong ZFS supporter.

Well, I don't trust Oracle, just watch the latest news about this company or look at their history. Furthermore I don't see the ability and foremost manpower in the FreeBSD community to accomplish such a task. Yes I know of illumos and the surrounding community, but developing a filesystem of such a complexity on it's own costs lots of money and requires a plethora of people with this special kind of know-how.

Would be nice to see DragonFlyBSD's Hammer FS in FreeBSD. This is a really free filesystem.

gkontos · Feb 26, 2011

oliverh said:
Well, I don't trust Oracle, just watch the latest news about this company or look at their history.

You can say that again.
Look at how nice they killed opensolaris. My only hope is that there will be money behind ZFS so oracle might see it in a different way.