I am also a huge fan of ZFS. I've been using it at home on my home server's 10TB partition for a few years now (back when that was a bit more impressive ;) ), and I even use it on some servers at work (big fan of the deduplication feature for our backup server--BackupPC + ZFS Dedup == Awesome).
So that said, I'm highly in favor of the OPTION of ZFS on RedSleeve. As you've mentioned, there are some cons to it, especially to embedded devices with limited resources. I think these types of devices should have the ability to stay on ext. Plus, there's some other considerations. In my case, I am currently using the RedSleeve OS as a base for a product I hope one day to market. I chose RedSleeve because of the stability inherent in the upstream's derivatives, including CentOS, and last I checked, RSEL is one of a kind--there's just no other EL-based ARM OSes out there (which surprises me). So stability is very important for me. Performance too (of which every little bit counts on an embedded device). But another one that I think people often forget, is that license-wise, ZFS is not technically compatible with linux. There are many who choose to ignore it (myself included on my home server), but the fact is, if I want to bring this to a commercial product eventually, I'm going to have to pay attention to those licenses. Others in my boat will too. Perhaps a compromise--what if two images were kept? One that's more "vanilla", and another with ZFS? My guess is that it's a little extra work, but that it wouldn't be that much--you would just create the vanilla as usual, and branch it off to modify it with ZFS. On Sat, May 16, 2015 at 10:18 AM, Gordan Bobic <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi all, > > I have been mulling over an idea and wanted to run it past people here to > see if there are any strong opinions either way. Speifically, where images > are provided, I've been pondering making the based on zfs (zfs-fuse for > now, at least until kernel mode zfs is more tested. > > Yes, I am catually proposing/advocating using zfs even for the rootfs. I > have been using nothing but zfs for all my non-root block devices for years > now, and have been using it for my rootfs-es wherever possible since late > last year without any problems. And zfs is one of those things that once > you try it you simply cannot imagine how you ever managed to make do > without it. > > There is certainly a fair amount of work involved in producing images, and > most importantly kernels and initramfs-es to go with those images, but I > think the benefits are worth it (where the kernel available for the devices > supports at least fuse or at least the kernel sources are available. > > The main drawback is performance. zfs-fuse is going to be slower than > ext*, there's no two ways about it. This is certainly going to be > noticeable for those running with SSDs. It may not be particularly > noticeable for those running on spinning rust but it will use more CPU, and > the zfs ARC cache will not be treated as releasable like normal page cache > under memory pressure (so have swap if you this is a problem). > > Thoughts? > > Gordan > _______________________________________________ > users mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.redsleeve.org/mailman/listinfo/users > -- --Mark
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