I am in the process of making a DIY NAS box and I am debating between mdadm + BTRFS and ZFS. What are your experiences with using ZFS on Arch? Have you run into any major issues? Does ZFS being an external kernel module cause any annoyances with the frequent Arch kernel updates?
Give me the dirty details! Any recommendations or pitfalls I should avoid?
Thanks!
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Smooth sailing so far. As some said, sometimes a new kernel comes out and OpenZFS needs to catch up. But for that I keep linux-lts around which is pretty much always compatible so if latest regular kernel can’t ZFS, there’s always the LTS kernel to boot back up. You probably will use linux-lts anyway since you’re building a NAS box and probably prioritize stability.
This is how I do it, installed the LTS kernel and never had an issue updating ZFS.
Thanks! Yeah I was definitely considering using
linux-ltsfor stability, although a weird part of me is addicted to that Arch life of constantly living on the edge.
I’m using zfs on arch for a few years now.
No issues with the filesystem at all!
The only thing I’m noticing is that on some ocasions I can’t run updates if a new kernel has just came out; the arch repo doesn’t have the zfs modules for the new kernel yet. Usually a day later I can run updates without an issue.
That’s good to hear, thanks for sharing! Out of curiosity what kind of RAID and storage volume have you set up?
I’ve got a pool of a collection of harddisks, mirrored. Performance is pretty decent considering the slow disks.
Oh having lots of available memory helps too, the ARC does a good job caching data, so the more the better.
It has been years since I last used zfs. Here’s what happened to me. I had a zpool nearly full. It died of 0 B/s read/write. Previously I had to recreate a zpool because a metadata error happened from loose connection. I forgot to export before unplug several times and processes accessing it went into D state, requiring a reboot to cleanup.
