So with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS is the ability to continue with a standard EXT4 file-system install, an encrypted file-system using LVM, or using OpenZFS with/without encryption. Ubuntu 24.04 LTS also has the ability to enjoy hardware-backed full-disk encryption with TPM as another new experimental option. Or, of course, the Ubuntu desktop installer continues supporting manual (custom) partitioning as well.
↫ Michael Larabel
I just use whatever Btrfs setup Fedora automatically recommends when I let it take over a disk – file systems for desktops seems a bit like a solved problem to me personally – but I’m still curious what benefits, for instance, an OpenZFS setup could bring to a desktop user compared to Btrfs or a basic Ext4 setup. Why should a desktop user use OpenZFS?
Thom Holwerda,
I don’t use openzfs because of the licensing incompatibilities keeping it out of mainline, but one of the features I would like ZFS for is being able to create new volumes within an openzfs raid array, which btrfs can’t do. This is useful if you need to run lots of VMs for example. It’s technically possible to use loopback devices to mount file systems within other file systems, but type of recursion is not ideal for performance and could multiply the damages caused by file system corruption across all the VMs. In my experience it is best to keep each VM’s file system in different volumes, otherwise the host file system becomes humongous and the fsck time can take forever.
Are there any distros that allow using bcachefs at install time?
I am using it for a /home partition on an EndeavourOS install and it seems great.
You don’t need it at install time have the installers /home within the root file system. After you’ve installed sort out bcachefs and your /etc/fstab mount it on /home and carry on with with life.
@tux2bsd
If that comment was for me, I think you misunderstood. I have been using bcachefs for one of the volumes on one of my machines. The initial install pre-dates the inclusion of bcachefs in the kernel. The root drive uses ext4. When I added a dedicated volume for /home, I used bcachefs for that as the kernel I was using supported it at that point.
My question is if there are any distros out there that allow you to choose bcachefs as the primary filesystem for the root directory at time of install.
It was but the reply button doesn’t tie back to the comment if not logged in unfortunately I didn’t notice.
I merely pointed out it isn’t difficult to get past once installed.
You can install a vast number of Distros and find the answer yourself, you are the individual with a unique want. You can come back and provide your answer if you wish.
Arg… the nesting didn’t work. Click reply, login, do reply then it wasn’t nested – seems it didn’t keep track of where it was at after the login.
I’m going forward to this feature for:
– possibility to do zfs snapshots, I use rolling snapshots every hour on the last 24h as a safeguard, snapshots take litteraly only a second to make, and I can track file differences between snapshots using zfs diff
– to scrub from time to time to be sure of the integrity of all the files
– so that if there is any faulty block, the OS warns me instead of feeding garbage to the applications
OpenZFS on Linux is not perfect but I believe it’s by far the best filesystem when you care about your file’s integrity.
ba4c577d,
Not to dissuade you, but in terms of Thom’s point it seems like you could use btrfs for all of those things.
One thing that’s really nice about btrfs raid is being able to add and remove disks of different sizes to the array willy nilly and it distributes the data dynamically to maximize the space available. For example, say you started with 2 X 1TB raid and want to expand later, you can add a 2TB disk to the btrfs raid and have the data stored redundantly across the 3 disks. Most static raid solutions don’t support asymmetric configurations and better still btrfs can rebalance arrays on the fly with zero downtime. This works better than ZFS.
As I mentioned at top, ZFS also has features I like too.
I was pretty happy with my own btrfs raid trials with one major exception, degraded raid functionality had to be set manually by an admin. This is deficient compared to other raid solutions and is why I could not use btrfs in production.
I haven’t seen anything comparing the statistical failure rates between btrfs and zfs file systems, they’re both designed to protect file integrity but I’m curious what the stats look like.
That’s very nice. I wanted to try the default Ubuntu ZFS, but I read that 22.04 had issues with it. Let’s hope ZFS becomes fully supported.