[TUHS] FreeBSD behind the times? (was: Favorite unix design principles?)

[Will Senn]

On 2/3/21 11:43 PM, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> On Sat, 30 Jan 2021, Larry McVoy wrote:
>
> [ Usual insightful...  insights ]
>
>> If you like ZFS you don't understand operating systems design.  I do.
> ...
>
> There's no way that I'd use ZFS; lose a block in an ordinary file, 
> well, you now have a hole (but not in the file-system sense); lose a 
> block in a compressed system, well...
>
ZFS needn't be compressed, and I don't generally do compression or 
encryption unless required by law, so I can't speak from personal 
experience on those use cases (others, far more experienced can). I do 
know that it's truly a pain to recover from issues with either.

In response to the negative vibes around ZFS. I've never lost a file (or 
a piece of a file) in 10+ years of using ZFS. I get the feeling we may 
not be talking about the same ZFS. My experience is with the ZFS FreeBSD 
comes with, not the version that Oracle owns. Perhaps the info is a 
little out of date for the naysayers. In my experience, using ZFS is 
fairly transparent and simple to use - no partitioning to deal with, no 
need to worry about generating filesystems, none of that - add your 
disks to a pool, choose your RAID levels and it gets mounted, no fuss. 
I've lost plenty of disks along the way, but ZFS just keeps on chugging 
along nicely until I replace them and then rebuilds the arrays, again, 
no fuss other than replacing the hardware. In terms of massive system 
updates and such, I just snapshot the environment (a near instantaneous 
operation) before making significant changes to my system, that might 
break things and when they do break (and they do, more often than I'd 
like), I just rollback. man bectl. Painless (and I mean painless, 
hundreds of times, or mor). I'm sure it all sounds scifi, but it's my 
experience along with plenty of other folks, and this ZFS sucks thread 
seems to be FUD to me - ala Microsoft vs Linux, or at best informed 
hypothetical speculations - reminds me of an if statement conversation I 
had online in the early 1990's where one group of folks claimed that 
braces worked a certain way, based on the then current standard, and 
another group of folks (I'd be on this side of things), tested the 
theory with a host of compilers, observed the functions effects, shook 
their heads and wondered why it didn't match up with the theory, and 
said it worked another. Who was right? I'm still not entirely sure, from 
a philosophical perspective, but I have since coded my if statements 
according to my environment, not the standards.

As I mentioned in the prior thread, I've lost my share of files and file 
systems (many, many times since 1993 when I started with linux - 0.9 
kernel, slackware, then redhat, then debian, now mint) with ext3/4, and 
btrfs, though, and the only recovery was backup (a time intensive 
process). I really don't see the logic behind the negative arguments. 
Don't like it, fine, say it and live it. Claim it sucks? Then, back it 
up with a real-world, current experience and I'll cede the point - I'll 
keep using ZFS though :).

I want to be clear, I don't dislike Linux. I don't think FreeBSD is 
superior. I like both. I use both... daily. With enough prep and 
planning, my linux environment is similarly recoverable, but with 
freebsd, the prep and planning requires a lot less time and effort. 
Personally, I heart linux Mint - it's based on Debian and Ubuntu - is a 
straightforward install, works well, has zfs (not yet on boot), has 
timeshift (lovely piece of software), and can be quite pretty.

Vive la difference.

Will