Solved ZFS, SSD and encryption.

Zerotronic

Zerotronic

I have a X220 laptop running FreeBSD 10.3 with ZFS and encryption on a plain HDD. I am considering buying an SSD to boost performance but I am not sure if TRIM and ZFS+Encryption work well together. After some research online, I found this page which states the following:https://www.freebsd.org/doc/faq/all-about-zfs.html

Note:
ZFS TRIM may not work with all configurations, such as a ZFS filesystem on a GELI-backed device.

From what I can understand from the above note, I should not use the encryption option when installing FreeBSD with ZFS on an SSD. TRIM will not work correctly and therefore the SSD life will be shortened.

Do I understand it correctly? Or is there something that I miss?

Sorry if this is a stupid question, but I really want to be sure, since SSDs are expensive and I don't want to make a mistake that will affect its performance.

Thank you in advance.
 
Yes, I had already read that thread, and I was happily browsing for a new SSD, but later on I stumbled upon the "All about ZFS" FAQ, where I read the note that I quoted earlier, which put me into doubt.

So your opinion is I should just go ahead and do it?

Thank you for your answer.
 
I'm pretty sure that GELI and ZFS TRIM play well together on recent FreeBSD versions. If you want to be certain, I'd recommend sending a message to the freebsd-fs@ mailing list. I've never seen any sign that GELI interferes with TRIM since I made that thread, but they know FreeBSD storage better than I do.
 
Thank you for your answer.

I will try to send an email to freebsd-fs and see if i can get an opinion there too.
Thanks.
 
In case anyone else has the same question, this is the answer that i got when i asked at freebsd-fs@ mailing list:

It will not work on 10.3, but will work (as Karl demonstrates) on
11.x. Here's the commit to head enabling it:

https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=286444

And here's what is in 10.3 (BIO_DELETE case returns EOPNOTSUPP):

https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/releng/10.3/sys/geom/eli/g_eli.c?revision=296373&view=markup#l319
Click to expand...

And here is the link to the mailing list itself.

So i will have to wait until September and the new release.

Edit: typo
 
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