@arichtman @craige That's why I install on btrfs, use timeshift for snapshots and grub-btrfs to make them available at boot. Now if I didn't also add 10 repositories and tinkered with apt pinning, my frankendebian upgrade from 12 to 13 wouldn't have resulted in me staring in disbelief at a blinking cursor....

#debian #btrfs #timeshift #frankendebian #broken

OK, riddle me this, #Linux (specifically #ArchLinux) fans.

You can use #ZFS and #btrfs on root to create snapshots before updating the OS. But you can't snapshot EFI, because that's on a separate FAT32 partition.

So what happens if you run an update (pacman -Syu in this case) that includes a kernel update, and something goes wrong? The version of the kernel in the EFI partition will be newer than the modules in the snapshotted /usr/lib/modules. That's surely going to cause an issue, right?

From memory (it's been over 15 years), Gentoo can have multiple versions of the same kernel installed at once. But Arch only allows one version of any package at one time.

A new 2TB SSD is on the way for my laptop, and I think it's time to make a shift to #ZFS or #btrfs (with #LUKS) for encryption and snapshotting.

Here's is a quick scratch list of thoughts for my use case. Please feel free to chip in with thoughts. I might update this toot if I think of anything else.

• Current experience
  • Already using ZFS with Alpine on an RPi 3 as a Syncthing node, and I'm happy with it. But this is an Arch laptop and I want to snapshot root, not just data.
  • Already using btrfs on a machine running openSUSE Kalpa. It's been a pretty good experience - managing snapshots seems pretty easy - but I'm not using it heavily.
• It's a laptop
  • I want to eke out as much battery life as possible.
  • Both have compression. AFAIK the CPU impact is negligible.
  • Is the drive wear more on one than the other? Is it negligible?
  • This is a laptop with one drive, not a server with multiple.
  • Some ZFS features probably won't be relevant, so does that narrow the gap between the two?
• Installation
  • As OpenZFS is usually slightly behind kernel release versions, ZFS on Arch either needs the LTS kernel (which I'm already running), or to artificially hold back the kernel version until the next one is released. Btrfs and LUKS is baked into the kernel.
  • ZFS needs a custom Arch Live ISO. Btrfs doesn't.
• Booting and snapshot handling
  • How would ZFSbootmenu work in conjunction with another bootloader? I'll need to (very rarely) run Windows.
  • What's the equivalent with btrfs? Would I need grub, or can I keep using rEFInd?
  • Do I want to keep using rEFInd for this?
• You can zfs send an encrypted volume, which is very cool. You can't do that with LUKS.
• "Send"ing
  • Does zfs send have to be sent to a ZFS filesystem, or does it just generate a file?
  • How about btrfs send?
• Encryption
  • Performance difference between LUKS and ZFS?
  • How about ZFS+native vs LUKS+ZFS vs LUKS+btrfs?
• General usage
  • Tools
  • ZFS: Sanoid and Syncoid
  • Btrfs: Snapper
• Other thoughts
  • I've got a couple of nice blog posts on getting the most out of ZFS. I haven't got any for btrfs yet (but surely they exist?)
  • Should compression be used at all for VM storage?

I guess it's time to finally decide (currently leaning towards 1)...

#nas #btrfs #zfs

I tried tuning various parameters but after some reading came to the conclusion that lots of small files with very little RAM is about the worst case scenario for XFS.

#linux #snac #btrfs