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🗂️ Aaron’s ZFS Guide – Table of Contents

Zpool Administration	ZFS Administration	Appendices
0. Install ZFS on Debian GNU/Linux	9. Copy-on-write	A. Visualizing The ZFS Intent Log (ZIL)
1. VDEVs	10. Creating Filesystems	B. Using USB Drives
2. RAIDZ	11. Compression and Deduplication	C. Why You Should Use ECC RAM
3. The ZFS Intent Log (ZIL)	12. Snapshots and Clones	D. The True Cost Of Deduplication
4. The Adjustable Replacement Cache (ARC)	13. Sending and Receiving Filesystems
5. Exporting and Importing Storage Pools	14. ZVOLs	Linked Content / Mirrored
6. Scrub and Resilver	15. iSCSI, NFS and Samba	Aaron’s ZFS Guide Linked: ZFS RAIDZ stripe width
7. Getting and Setting Properties	16. Getting and Setting Properties	Aaron’s ZFS Guide Linked: How A ZIL Improves Disk Latencies
8. Best Practices and Caveats	17. Best Practices and Caveats

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UPDATE (May 06, 2012): I apologize for mentioning it supports encryption. Pool version 28 is the latest source that the Free Software community has. Encryption was not added until pool version 30. So, encryption is not supported natively with the ZFS on Linux project. However, you can use LUKS containers underneath, or you can use Ecryptfs for the entire filesystem, which would still give you all the checksum, scrubbing and data integrity benefits of ZFS. Until Oracle gets their act together, and releases the current sources of ZFS, crypto is not implemented.

Quick post on installing ZFS as a kernel module, not FUSE, on Debian GNU/Linux. The documents already exist for getting this going, I’m just hoping to spread this to a larger audience, in case you are unaware that it exists.

First, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has been working on porting the native Solaris ZFS source to the Linux kernel as a kernel module. So long as the project remains under contract by the Department of Defense in the United States, I’m confident there will be continuous updates. You can track the progress of that porting at http://zfsonlinux.org.

UPDATE (May 05, 2013): I’ve updated the installation instructions. The old instructions included downloading the source and installing from there. At the time, that was all that was available. Since then, the ZFS on Linux project has created a proper Debian repository that you can use to install ZFS. Here is how you would do that:

$ su -
# wget http://archive.zfsonlinux.org/debian/pool/main/z/zfsonlinux/zfsonlinux_2%7Ewheezy_all.deb
# dpkg -i zfsonlinux_2~wheezy_all.deb
# apt-get update
# apt-get install debian-zfs

And that’s it!

If you’re running Ubuntu, which I know most of you are, you can install the packages from the Launchpad PPA https://launchpad.net/~zfs-native.

UPDATE (May 05, 2013): The following instructions may not be relevant for fixing the manpages. If they are, I’ve left them in this post, just struck out.

A word of note: the manpages get installed to /share/man/. I found this troubling. You can modify your $MANPATH variable to include /share/man/man8/, or by creating symlinks, which is the approach I took:

# cd /usr/share/man/man8/
# ln -s /share/man/man8/zdb.8 zdb.8
# ln -s /share/man/man8/zfs.8 zfs.8
# ln -s /share/man/man8/zpool.8 zpool.8

Now, make your zpool, and start playing:

$ sudo zpool create test raidz sdd sde sdf sdg sdh sdi

It is stable enough to run a ZFS root filesystem on a GNU/Linux installation for your workstation as something to play around with. It is copy-on-write, supports compression, deduplication, file atomicity, off-disk caching, encryption, and much more. At this point, unfortunately, I’m convinced that ZFS as a Linux kernel module will become “stable” long before Btrfs will be stable in the mainline kernel. Either way, it doesn’t matter to me. Both are Free Software, and both provide the long needed features we’ve needed with today’s storage needs. Competition is healthy, and I love having choice. Right now, that choice might just be ZFS.

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This article includes content by Aaron Toponce, originally published on pthree.org in 2012, which is unfortunately no longer available online. I’ve mirrored his valuable work here to ensure that readers continue to have access to this information.