After a very energetic initial push with ZFS on the desktop and tooling, the initiative seems to have fizzled out as of late. It is impossible at the moment to create an encrypted ZFS desktop installation on 22.10 for instance, and the new installer for 23.04 doesn’t have the option at all. Ubuntu server’s installer doesn’t even offer it as an option.
What is Canonical’s position on ZFS and zsys on Ubuntu Desktop going forward? I’m personally very keen since BTRFS is still lacking in some departments like encryption - LUKS on ssd means no trim, which is a problem.
Thank you for asking this question. I was about to build a new system and was planning on using ZFS this time. I’m glad I saw this before I got started…
The new Flutter installer is a frontend for Subiquity and Subiquity does not have ZFS support yet, so no support for installing 23.04 on ZFS root.
Of course, you still can use ZFS for create storages.
But do you know whether ZFS root support is at all planned for subiquity? I know zsys is abandoned, and the main rationale for it was to sync rpool and bpool snapshots and add entries to grub, but there are other alternatives like zfsbootmenu that could be looked at.
It might not notice so much on modern SSD’s but i noticed on an old mechanical drive that ZFS seemed faster and smoother than Btrfs so i hope ZFS continues to be supported.
I seem to remember hearing you can’t put a swapfile on a btrfs partition either… you’d have to revert back to a dedicated swap partition. Is this the case?
The swapfile is supported on Btrfs, the only limitation is that it must be “nocow”, the best solution is to put it on a “nocow” subvolume. Since btrfs-progs 6.1 you can do it with this command:
Seems like the main issue at hand is GRUB and its lackluster ZFS support, mandating all the complexity around two boot pools and zsys to keep snapshotting in sync for recovery from GRUB.
I have a single, ZFS root pool with native encryption, and ditched GRUB entirely, going with ZFSBootMenu instead with automatic snapshots via sanoid. This works really well. Perhaps something that Ubuntu could ship for desktop, although it’s limited to EFI. There’s a guide here for the tinkerer: https://docs.zfsbootmenu.org/en/latest/guides/ubuntu/uefi.html
Thanks for heads up on this. Having just committed to ZFS on root on my 22.04 install for my main work machine recently, this news is a bit disappointing. Hoping we see some movement on continued ZFS support in the next LTS releases…
I reinstalled my laptop some weeks ago. I had previously used the Ubuntu ZFS experimental option. This time I used https://github.com/Sithuk/ubuntu-server-zfsbootmenu, which makes the ZFSBootMenu install a lot simpler.
However, as of today, I can no longer update the kinetic build on that ppa to 2.2.0rc2, as I’m getting a “kinetic is obsolete and will not accept new uploads” message. I suppose I can create a focal backport, but that’s more frustrating as that requires modifications to the source to work.
There are patches for OpenZFS 2.2 to support kernel 6.5 going in, and hopefully it will be fully supported by the release version of 2.2, but it would be nice not to have to juggle multiple versions of OpenZFS and multiple ubuntu updates to get us to a working release when I’m doing a clean install.
(I’d prefer not to use ubuntu-server-zfsbootmenu as the existing grub integration seems to work quite well…)
That’s great news, but I think Canonical need to rethink the approach for root zfs. The current system is really cumbersome and let’s be honest, it’s held with saliva and swearwords with grub hacks and zsys.
The best implementation for a zfs root system, and that’s what I’ve been using for a year, goes by using a single zfs pool for root, ZFSBootMenu and sanoid (for fs, boot and snapshots) instead of separate root/boot pools, grub and zsys. It’s UEFI only (because of ZFS boot), but in this day and age for a desktop computer I don’t see the downside.