ZFS on Linux based systems

Is there anyone who has more experience with ZFS under Linux based systems ? I saw ZFS fuse library, but I don't know it;s worth a test or not. Stable, usable ? Maybe as a storage ? Or only experimental projects ?

Solution 1:

I would say it's only for testing or non-io-intensive tasks. The problem is that it is in userspace. Native ZFS on Linux is far from stable. Interested in it too but the only real option is export iscsi zvol from solaris to linux of share zfs via nfs to linux.

Solution 2:

zfs-fuse works pretty well on Linux, and for many workloads the bottleneck will be the disks and not fuse. If you give it plenty of memory (ARC > 1GB) it works surprisingly well as a primary filesystem (for home directories/etc).

Also, zfs send piped to zfs receive in the same box works correctly:

root:~/ # zfs list
NAME                    USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT
igorhvr-main            257G   211G  6.56M  /igorhvr-main
igorhvr-main/home       183G   211G   181G  /igorhvr-main/home
igorhvr-main/teste     23.5K   211G  23.5K  /igorhvr-main/teste
root:~/ # zfs send igorhvr-main/teste@2012-03-05_08h15m | zfs receive igorhvr-main/teste3
root:~/ # zfs list
NAME                    USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT
igorhvr-main            257G   211G  6.56M  /igorhvr-main
igorhvr-main/home       183G   211G   181G  /igorhvr-main/home
igorhvr-main/teste     23.5K   211G  23.5K  /igorhvr-main/teste
igorhvr-main/teste3    23.5K   211G  23.5K  /igorhvr-main/teste3
root:~/ # ps -ef | grep zfs
    root      1213     1  0 Mar09 ?        00:32:50 /sbin/zfs-fuse --pidfile /var/run/zfs-fuse.pid
    root     22383 22273  0 01:17 pts/12   00:00:00 grep zfs
root:~/ #