Enhancing our ZFS support on Ubuntu 19.10 - an introduction

Desktop
42

For now, it will require a full disk on the first iterations. (Then, you can install and extending, adding other disks on the pool).
Custom/advanced mode will probably be there in the future for a finer-grained control.

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43

The installer limitation with respect to the use of partitions is new for me. For me partitions are important, since

  • I divide my desktop SSD between the boot datapool and L2ARC/LOG and
  • I have 2 datapools on my SSHD laptop, one for the system and Virtual Machines (VM) and one for data and large archives. I want to keep the systems and Virtual Machines in the begin of the SSHD, because the HDD throughput is often twice as high there!
    Booting from manually installed ZFS datapools on partitions worked fine during this year for 18.04, 19.04 and 19.10.
  1. Is the main limitation for the use of partitions in the installer?
  2. Can I install 19.10 on any existing zfs datapool? Or related, do you support dual and triple boots?

I can snapshot my system and rollback to such a snapshot using the terminal and boot again. So I can live with any limitations in the snapshot boot menu.

Iā€™m running FreeBSD on a 32-bits Pentium-4. That ancient PC is the backup-server (incremental send/receive) for especially my Ubuntu Virtualbox VMs. A question out of curiosity:

  1. Did you copy parts of the new software from FreeBSD-12, since I see the same limitations (partitions) and approach (datasets)?

  2. We are less then a week from the Beta-freeze and kernel-freeze, do you still expect to release it with 19.10?

44

When you do implement encryption, have you considered using zfs native encryption to encrypt individual home file systems with a key per user, replacing the functionality of ecryptfs?

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45

Indeed, itā€™s limited in the first installer implementation. However, nothing prevents you from doing your custom installation via debootstrap or any other form. The system itself handles whatever layout you wish. The guided/help installation (native to ubiquity) will be as described above though in its first round.

Those arenā€™t related.
As told, via a manual installation like debootstrap, you can install 19.10 on existing zfs datapool. However, I doubt your layout will be compatible with zsys and you lose all advanced features (basically, you have zfs as of today, and you need to handle it manually).

On the other questions, the advanced grub support we introduced in 19.10 have multiple system support, as you have already seen and discussed above.

No.

The installer option should be released once reviewed. We got final design last week (due to an issue in the ubiquity codebase preventing implementing previous design).

Zsys will stay in universe, meaning: not installed by default, but an option for those who wants to experiment with it.

There are 2 contestants in the room here:

  • lvm + luks + zfs. The underlying (lvm + luks) is already natively supported in ubuntu for TPM, so the goal would be to reuse the existing code. However, we plan for next week with the kernel team to have performance comparison so that we know where we stand at.
  • native zfs encryption, which means reimplementing the whole integration with various components (plymouth, grub, the initramfsā€¦), which is more work. Also the encryption is fresh from 0.8 and we need to evaluate how stable it is.
    Anyway, those items will be for the second phase, once zsys is a little bit more mature.
46

I think this maybe off-topic: ZFS On Linux 0.8.2 just released.

Since the Linux 5.3 is already in Eoan, will Eoan adapt this newer release as well?

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47

Just found the ZFS installer code got merged, congrats!

Looking forward to test it (in a VM first of course). :grin:

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48

That is good news. Anyone know how often they release a new installer iso.

49

Is it not released daily?

50

Good!! I already did give up on it, after I did see yesterday, that the grub boot from a ZFS snapshot had been removed from the grub menu.

51

thanks, I will use the desktop version. I was using the server install iso.

52

Are there instructions on how to get zfs setup? I looked at the manual partitioning but donā€™t see zfs anywhere.

53

I donā€™t think there would be much if any instructions, since most of the users interested have done manual formatting in FreeBSD or another ZFS system. As far as I know if it does not show up then it simply is not there. If Antony-shen just saw the merge today then I would guess it would not be there until tomorrow.

DIdrocks, did mention they would make an announcement, so I am not sure when it will show up.

54

Even the code got merged, the particular version of package is still in proposed state and wonā€™t be included in the CD, unless it getting out of that state and entering ā€œmainā€, then the iso will have it.

It will be an option before the partition page and can only apply to full disk installation scenario, so will be unlikely to install this new release with zfs root to an old machine with other OS coexisting. I think only a few guys will try this feature with real hardware.

So before getting too excited we should wait a few days for announcement.

56

I use ZFS on my laptop since begin of 2019. I boot from ZFS and all my data is stored in ZFS. The upgrade to 19.10 worked fine for my triple boot:

  • Ubuntu Mate 19.10 on ZFS
  • Xubuntu 19.10 on ZFS
  • Ubuntu 19.10 on EXT4

Currently the only changes, except the ones from ZFS 0.8.1 itself, are:

  • the release upgrade from 19.04 to 19.10 works fine also for ZFS, however the last daily-update of ZFS 0.8.1 with bug-fixes failed. My system still uses the old sub-version without the bug-fixes.
  • the datapool/dataset disk lay-out has changed, donā€™t upgrade the datapools till all relevant OSes have been upgraded to 19.10.
  • update-grub recognizes the systems booting from ZFS automatically and adds them to the grub menu. I could delete my 40_custom in /etc/grub.d

Take a snapshot before you do a release upgrade. I used it on my desktop. On detecting that I had no working version of Virtualbox for Linux 5.3, I rolled back from 19.10 to the last snapshot of 19.04.

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57

When I Googled, only thing it said was ZFSā€™ capacity to support multiple disks ? Is there any other benefit if you choose ZFS on laptop over ext4 ?

58

The new installer got released!! :heart_eyes:

59

I donā€™t see it. Only ISOā€™s from the 7th.

60

Hmm, maybe there are different pages for different countries/time zones. Iā€™ll search for Australia, which should have the 8th by now.

61

I would suggest waiting until official ZFS team announcement to play with it. :sweat_smile:

62

Where did you find it? What is the URL?