Goodbye FreeNAS

[chipped]

Another migrator here. ZFS is no longer going forward (development pretty much stalled). All of you will eventually be using a BTRFS system in the future. You can quote me on that.

Oh wait. btrfs was abandoned by red hat? jk on this.

 

[Ericloewe]

ZFS is no longer going forward

I guess that's true if your reference frame has the same velocity as ZFS (which is considerable, probably the filesystem with the greatest amount of work being put into it), but that's like saying the solar system revolves around the Earth - not a completely absurd position, but your calculations become needlessly complicated.

The following link points to the openZFS upstream repository. It doesn't reflect work being done privately or in OSes other than Illumos (and even Illumos seems to have significant development internally before it's released).
https://github.com/openzfs/openzfs/commits/master
Notice the large amount of commits for various parts of the filesystem and its interaction with the OS.

 

[chipped]

I guess that's true if your reference frame has the same velocity as ZFS (which is considerable, probably the filesystem with the greatest amount of work being put into it), but that's like saying the solar system revolves around the Earth - not a completely absurd position, but your calculations become needlessly complicated.

Hah!! Yeah right. What about features being added, like Block Pointer Rewrite instead of random bug fixes for enterprise that will never be useful to most people using FreeNAS.

Here are three filesystems which are probably being developed more than ZFS (in no particular order):

- APFS
- ReFS
- BTRFS

 

[devster]

Another migrator here. ZFS is no longer going forward (development pretty much stalled). All of you will eventually be using a BTRFS system in the future. You can quote me on that.

And then we have FreeNAS which is going backwards.

Goodbye, enjoy the ride peeps :)

Probably, but the future is nowhere close. I was eager to switch to BTRFS, but I just discovered that even RAID1 is only "Mostly OK", meaning that you can get stuck with disks in read only mode forever if you try to mount them more than once when degraded. Honestly, it's nowhere close to being usable.

 

[chipped]

Probably, but the future is nowhere close. I was eager to switch to BTRFS, but I just discovered that even RAID1 is only "Mostly OK", meaning that you can get stuck with disks in read only mode forever if you try to mount them more than once when degraded. Honestly, it's nowhere close to being usable.

Going by that logic ZFS on FreeNAS wouldn't be considered stable either. You're always going to have bugs and issues.

Example: https://www.google.com.au/#newwindow=1&q=site:freenas.org+can't+import+pool

 

[Ericloewe]

Also, it doesn't hurt to reiterate this, straight from the btrfs wiki:

In other words, btrfs doesn't actually work if a drive fails in a mirrored setup. And it doesn't work at all with RAID5/6 and is subject to a write hole.

But of course, rampant instability and lack of proper design decisions is the hallmark of a good product! Nobody wants a stable, reliable filesystem that protects data.

Block Pointer Rewrite

It'd be nice, but it's not very compatible with the design of ZFS. All things considered, it's an acceptable trade-off.

random bug fixes for enterprise that will never be useful to most people using FreeNAS

Sure, nobody but enterprise will ever use any of the following features, either recently added or under development (off the top of my head, there's plenty more):

• Compressed ARC/L2ARC
• Compressed send/recv
• Native encryption (including send/recv of encrypted text, suddenly transforming any ZFS backup solution into an easy way to have encrypted cloud backups)
  
• Persistent L2ARC (this one is very enterprise-centric)

Going by that logic ZFS on FreeNAS wouldn't be considered stable either. You're always going to have bugs and issues.

ZFS actually works, btrfs doesnt, as the btrfs wiki neatly explains. Here's a non-comprehensive things that are standard on ZFS and cause no trouble but break btrfs:

• Drive failures (these render btrfs volumes unusable, even if redundancy still exists)
• Parity RAID (RAID5/6-like setup)
• Quotas
• Compression (if there's damage on a compressed disk, btrfs may crash)
• Disk replacements:

Example: https://www.google.com.au/#newwindow=1&q=site:freenas.org+can't+import+pool

Leaving aside the important detail that Google finds ~3 times more results for "btrfs cannot import volume" than for "zfs cannot import volume", most cases of unimportable ZFS pools are caused by negligence. Nothing will save your data if the only copy of it dies along with a failing disk.

 

[Ericloewe]

Here are three filesystems which are probably being developed more than ZFS (in no particular order):

- APFS
- ReFS
- BTRFS

Forgot to reply to this little bit:

All of those see surprisingly less development effort than would be expected, except perhaps for APFS, which is more of an embedded device filesystem than something I'd trust my data to.

• APFS doesn't checksum data and is Apple only. That makes it close to irrelevant.
• ReFS is seeing surprisingly little development, it's still lagging behind NTFS in terms of basic features and it somehow manages to be less of a CoW filesystem than NTFS, in some cases. Also closed, but it's actually available for servers.
• btrfs sees a lot of movement, but not much real development. See above for details, but I can't avoid mentioning the write hole again. Seriously, write hole. In 2017.

 

[Ericloewe]

Also, I am closing this thread.

You want to leave FreeNAS/ZFS for btrfs? Fine, spare us your drama and you'll be spared the shame of later having to publicly admit to losing data because btrfs ate it.

You think you know more than the btrfs devs/community and think it's better than ZFS? That's not fine and you should seek professional help.

You think btrfs is going to magically improve and surpass ZFS out of the blue? That's fine, it's your data and your problem.

You think btrfs is better and needs to be advertised as something it isn't (stable/reliable/etc.)? That's not fine, hence why I am closing this thread.

 

[Ericloewe]

Because I stumbled upon this thread again: RAIDZ expansion is happening in FreeBSD 12. Not that I expect that to overcome any hatred of ZFS.

 

[jgreco]

In response to a "complaint" filed on this thread -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Njt82e_3qVo

https://reviews.freebsd.org/D15124

It looks like it will be coming.