This branch in particular addresses your points: I agree with a lot of what was posted in it so might be easier to share that: Is there any more concrete example of how ZFS is actually better integrated on FreeBSD compared to Linux, say Ubuntu? It takes ZFS snapshots automatically during apt upgrades, root-on-ZFS is a default installer option, etc.Ĭoincidentally there was a discussion about this yesterday. Sure FreeBSD periodically imports it into master from OpenZFS (née ZoL), but all development happens elsewhere, and the SPL is still trying to emulate a Solaris interface on top of both OSes. It's an out-of-tree filesystem for both OSes. In both Linux and FreeBSD, ZFS's bolt-on ARC competes with the kernel's actual page cache for resources instead of properly integrating with it. Maybe it would be okay to move entirely over to ZFS's volume manager but it only supports ZFS's own filesystem, you can't use the ZFS volume manager with a normal FreeBSD UFS2 partition. The standard volume manager on FreeBSD is vinum/geom ZFS ships its entire separate volume manager to the host OS, so you can't use mount/umount to control mounting a ZFS volume. I think 'smoother experience on FreeBSD' is a myth. There’s room for both Linux and FreeBSD in this world :) Whereas FreeBSD has the same org who manage the kernel, user land and who also push ZFS.Īnd I say this as someone who loves Linux. Not because Linux can’t do the job but because there are so many different contributors with their own unique preferences that Linux is essentially loose Lego pieces with no instructions. This is why platforms like FreeBSD feel more harmonious than Linux. Whereas on FreeBSD all the tooling around Jails is built with ZFS in mind. Thus everything takes that extra couple of steps to set up, fix, and maintain.įor example, if you want to use ZFS as a storage for containers on Linux, you have to spend hours hunting around for some poorly maintained 3rd party shell scripts or build some tooling yourself. As opposed to Linux where some distros might ship pre-compiled binaries but everything is written assuming you’re not running ZFS. Thus the user land and documentation is written assuming you’re running ZFS. ZFS will always be a smoother experience on FreeBSD as opposed to Linux because FreeBSD endorses it.

Openzfs on linux