OpenZFS from ports

[andrew clarke]

Update : I no longer recommend PEFS. At least not at the moment.

To my surprise, sysutils/pefs-kmod (2018.11.26) fails to build under
FreeBSD 13.0-REL, and it's beyond my knowledge to fix it.

It's also not possible to load the kernel driver from the FreeBSD 12.2
build of PEFS in FreeBSD 13.0:

Apr 14 17:37:35 blizzard kernel: KLD pefs.ko: depends on kernel - not available or version mismatch
Apr 14 17:37:35 blizzard kernel: linker_load_file: /boot/modules/pefs.ko - unsupported file type

So beware that if you upgrade to FreeBSD 13.0 and you have any PEFS
data, you won't be able to access it from that machine after the upgrade.
The only way I could access mine was via SSHFS from another system still
running FreeBSD 12.2.

Evidently development on PEFS seems to have stalled, so I'm not expecting
a patch to fix the build on 13.0 any time soon. Consequently I'm looking at
moving the data to a ZFS encrypted filesystem on the 13.0 machine, but for
various reasons I'm a bit hesitant.

There is also ENCFS (sysutils/fusefs-encfs), which still works in FreeBSD
13.0, though from memory the performance wasn't great compared to PEFS.


On 2021-04-03 20:54:42, andrew clarke (mail at ozzmosis.com) wrote:

> On 2021-04-03 11:10:29, Andrea Venturoli (ml at netfence.it) wrote:
>
> > My (not definitive) plan would be:
> > _ move everything to ZFS first (this would be to a new set of HDs, so I
> > could keep the old ones as backup), losing encryption;
> > _ upgrade to 12.2;
> > _ switch to OpenZFS;
> > _ create a new encrypted dataset and move there the data that should be
> > encrypted.
>
> Depending on your needs, running PEFS on top of ZFS may be an option, at least
> temporarily until you upgrade to FreeBSD 13.