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I run a server using 5 drives in a raidz2 through zfs-fuse, but sometimes encounter an issue where the pool becomes unavailable. The issue seems to co-inside with high levels of activity on the pool, and I suspect that this is causing zfs-fuse to crash and not be remountable without the -l arg. This may simply be due to the fact that zfs-fuse runs in user mode.

This brought up the question of using ZOL instead of zfs-fuse for performance or stability reasons.

My question is: which is better and why? Are they at the same levels of maturity and stability? Would there be any issues switching over, or can I simply follow the instructions here.

The last post I found about this was from 2008, and I would like a more recent answer.

RedTedRedemption
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ZOL still is in it's developing part, and sadly, this developing part isn't stable. You may achieve decent results when you just install ZOL and don't touch it from this point, but when you will try to do something that is routine in the ZFS-native OS (Solaris/FreeBSD), such as

  • trying to grow a pool by send/receiving on larger disks or merey resizing them in a virtual environment
  • trying to upgrade your kernel version while booting from zfs and/or having root there. Or when you even don't have root there.

you will get weird results, sometimes system-destructive.

So basically - don't use ZFS on Linux in your production until you're ready for those. "Ready" here means - you have standby servers, hot backups and so on. Otherwise use FreeBSD (yes, they switched their ZFS upstream to ZOL, but they also have injected a massive amount of FreeBSD-specific patches there and they still have loads of FreeBSD-code in their kernel that Linux just doesn't have) since Solaris sems to be already dead.

P.S. And don't use FUSE at all.

drookie
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