> On Jul 30, 2014, at 3:21 PM, Stefan Baur <[email protected]> 
> wrote:
> 
> Am 30.07.2014 um 22:09 schrieb Espen Johansen:
>> ZFS = FS+LVM. Its efficient in many ways. Its highly resillient to
>> things like silent data corruption ( disk FW bugs, power spikes). It has
>> on the fly checking and repair. Copy on write, snapshoting, NFSv4 native
>> acls and a few more nice things. I dont understand the bashing?
> 
> This is a firewall, not a fileserver, where such features do indeed make
> sense.  And no bashing, just saying "I don't care what filesystem
> pfSense uses under the hood, as long as it works".  The fact that it
> spits out a warning seems to indicate that it does not work and there's
> something wrong, so I came here to ask.

tl;dr:  I wouldn’t run ZFS… yet.

I didn’t see the error message, you’re barking up a tree attempting to use it 
right now.

That said, there are certain advantages to ZFS, and there are internal 
experiments underway looking to use it for a future (64-bit only) release of 
pfSense.

The data integrity and resiliency (due to COW semantics & checksumming) (etc) 
is one thing.  I’ve had pretty good results turning on LZJB
compression and ‘copies=2”, which is nearly as good as a nanobsd image with 2 
separate slices, and, since you have a live filesystem,
has NONE of the drawbacks of the nanobsd approach.  One could even ‘checkpoint’ 
(snapshot) the zvol prior to any change (pkg install, config change, etc),
and, of course "zfs send | ssh foo; zfs receive” makes it entirely trivial to 
keep your entire firewall backed up, rather than (just) the config file.

People who say, “I can’t fathom a sensible use care for using ZFS on pfSense” 
or “why use it to replace nanobsd?” are (likely) stuck in a 
system admin mindset/mentality(*).  I get the same pushback about bhyve (“why 
would you use that on a firewall?”) from people stuck in the same
headspace.   I’m not going to reveal everything here, because it’s going to be 
post-2.2 before any of this comes about, and I’m keeping the focus on 2.2.

In short: ZFS is not just about building a NAS.

Jim

(*) If there isn’t an O’Reilly book out about it, it seems to not exist to 
these people.
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