alt Hacker NewsZFS on FreeBSD is first class. I had an old FreeNAS raid z5 array on 5x 500GB disks that I wanted to check 4 years after decommissioning the system. I put together a temporary machine with all the disks plugged in and without doing anything the live FreeBSD image found and configured the array. I was instantly able to look through the file system and even dump it to my current FreeBSD server with almost 0 effort. I was sold after that. These days I prefer to run small systems and basic services. I don't want webguis or docker images anymore.
Replies
Just so you know: the zfs in freebsd and in linux are the same codebase. Literally. It’s OpenZFS.
Also, a few years ago the FreeBSD people decided to throw away their own ZFS implementation and import the linux one (OpenZFS) because they couldn’t keep up with the development pace.
Nowadays ZFS development is collaborative but in each major freebsd release it’s clearly marked which OpenZFS releases they imported in the FreeBSD codebase.
Right. On my development workstation I use Arch and I'm always worried a kernel upgrade is going to break the ZFS module. For those that aren't familiar, ZFS isn't part of mainline Linux because of licensing incompatibility (and general distrust of Oracle).
On FreeBSD I know its always going to work.