ZFS...

[Paul Mather]

On May 6, 2019, at 10:14 AM, Michelle Sullivan <michelle at sorbs.net> wrote:

> My issue here (and not really what the blog is about) FreeBSD is  
> defaulting to it.

You've said this at least twice now in this thread so I'm assuming you're  
asserting it to be true.

As of FreeBSD 12.0-RELEASE (and all earlier releases), FreeBSD does NOT  
default to ZFS.

The images distributed by freebsd.org, e.g., Vagrant boxes, ARM images, EC2  
instances, etc., contain disk images where FreeBSD resides on UFS.  For  
example, here's what you end up with when you launch a 12.0-RELEASE  
instance using defaults on AWS (us-east-1 region: ami-03b0f822e17669866):

root at freebsd:/usr/home/ec2-user # gpart show
=>       3  20971509  ada0  GPT  (10G)
          3       123     1  freebsd-boot  (62K)
        126  20971386     2  freebsd-ufs  (10G)

And this is what you get when you "vagrant up" the  
freebsd/FreeBSD-12.0-RELEASE box:

root at freebsd:/home/vagrant # gpart show
=>       3  65013755  ada0  GPT  (31G)
          3       123     1  freebsd-boot  (62K)
        126   2097152     2  freebsd-swap  (1.0G)
    2097278  62914560     3  freebsd-ufs  (30G)
   65011838      1920        - free -  (960K)


When you install from the 12.0-RELEASE ISO, the first option listed during  
the partitioning stage is "Auto (UFS)  Guided Disk Setup".  The last option  
listed---after "Open a shell and partition by hand" is "Auto (ZFS)  Guided  
Root-on-ZFS".  In other words, you have to skip over UFS and manual  
partitioning to select the ZFS install option.

So, I don't see what evidence there is that FreeBSD is defaulting to ZFS.   
It hasn't up to now. Will FreeBSD 13 default to ZFS?


>  FreeBSD used to be targeted at enterprise and devs (which is where I found it)... however the last few years have been a big push into the consumer (compete with Linux) market.. so you have an OS that concerns itself with the desktop and upgrade after upgrade after upgrade (not just patching security issues, but upgrades as well.. just like windows and OSX)... I get it.. the money is in the keeping of the user base.. but then you install a file system which is dangerous on a single disk by default... dangerous because it’s trusted and “can’t fail” .. until it goes titsup.com and then the entire drive is lost and all the data on it..  it’s the double standard... advocate you need ECC ram, multiple vdevs etc, then single drive it.. sorry.. which one is it? Gaaaaaarrrrrrrgggghhhhhhh!


As people have pointed out elsewhere in this thread, it's false to claim  
that ZFS is unsafe on consumer hardware.  It's no less safe than UFS on  
single-disk setups.

Because anecdote is not evidence, I will refrain from saying, "I've lost  
far more data on UFS than I have on ZFS (especially when SUJ was shaking  
out its bugs)..." >;-)

What I will agree with is that, probably due to its relative youth, ZFS has  
less forensics/data recovery tools than UFS.  I'm sure this will improve as  
time goes on.  (I even posted a link to an article describing someone  
adding ZFS support to a forensics toolkit earlier in this thread.)

Cheers,

Paul.