this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2024
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About a year ago I switched to ZFS for Proxmox so that I wouldn't be running technology preview.

Btrfs gave me no issues for years and I even replaced a dying disk with no issues. I use raid 1 for my Proxmox machines. Anyway I moved to ZFS and it has been a less that ideal experience. The separate kernel modules mean that I can't downgrade the kernel plus the performance on my hardware is abysmal. I get only like 50-100mb/s vs the several hundred I would get with btrfs.

Any reason I shouldn't go back to btrfs? There seems to be a community fear of btrfs eating data or having unexplainable errors. That is sad to hear as btrfs has had lots of time to mature in the last 8 years. I would never have considered it 5-6 years ago but now it seems like a solid choice.

Anyone else pondering or using btrfs? It seems like a solid choice.

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[–] BrownianMotion@lemmy.world 5 points 2 days ago (2 children)

My setup is different to yours but not totally different. I run ESXi 8, and I started to use BTRFS on some of my VM's.

I had a power failure, that was longer than the UPS could handle. Most of the system shutdown safely, a few VM's did not. All of the EXT4 VM's were easily recovered (including another one that was XFS). TWO of the BTRFS systems crashed into a non recoverable state.

Nothing I could do to fix them, they were just toast. I had no choice but to recover using backups. This made me highly aware that BTRFS is still not a reliable FS.

I am migrating everything from BTRFS to something more stable and reliable like EXT4. It's simply not worth the headache.

[–] Philippe23@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)
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[–] suzune@ani.social 8 points 2 days ago (13 children)

The question is how do you get a bad performance with ZFS?

I just tried to read a large file and it gave me uncached 280 MB/s from two mirrored HDDs.

The fourth run (obviously cached) gave me over 3.8 GB/s.

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[–] Moonrise2473@feddit.it 6 points 2 days ago (2 children)

One day I had a power outage and I wasn't able to mount the btrfs system disk anymore. I could mount it in another Linux but I wasn't able to boot from it anymore. I was very pissed, lost a whole day of work

[–] Philippe23@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)
[–] Moonrise2473@feddit.it 2 points 2 days ago

I think 5 years ago, on Ubuntu

[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 2 points 2 days ago

ACID go brrr

If it didn't give you problems, go for it. I've run it for years and never had issues either.

[–] ikidd@lemmy.world 0 points 1 day ago

btrfs raid subsystem hasn't been fixed and is still buggy, and does weird shit on scrubs. But fill your boots, it's your data.

[–] tripflag@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago

Not proxmox-specific, but I've been using btrfs on my servers and laptops for the past 6 years with zero issues. The only times it's bugged out is due to bad hardware, and having the filesystem shouting at me to make me aware of that was fantastic.

The only place I don't use zfs is for my nas data drives (since I want raidz2, and btrfs raid5 is hella shady) but the nas rootfs is btrfs.

[–] poVoq@slrpnk.net 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I am using btrfs on raid1 for a few years now and no major issue.

It's a bit annoying that a system with a degraded raid doesn't boot up without manual intervention though.

Also, not sure why but I recently broke a system installation on btrfs by taking out the drive and accessing it (and writing to it) from another PC via an USB adapter. But I guess that is not a common scenario.

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[–] catloaf@lemm.ee 2 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Meh. I run proxmox and other boot drives on ext4, data drives on xfs. I don't have any need for additional features in btrfs. Shrinking would be nice, so maybe someday I'll use ext4 for data too.

I started with zfs instead of RAID, but I found I spent way too much time trying to manage RAM and tuning it, whereas I could just configure RAID 10 once and be done with it. The performance differences are insignificant, since most of the work it does happens in the background.

You can benchmark them if you care about performance. You can find plenty of discussion by googling "ext vs xfs vs btrfs" or whichever ones you're considering. They haven't changed that much in the past few years.

[–] WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

but I found I spent way too much time trying to manage RAM and tuning it,

I spent none, and it works fine. what was your issue?

[–] catloaf@lemm.ee 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I have four 6tb data drives and 32gb of RAM. When I set them up with zfs, it claimed quite a few gb of RAM for its cache. I tried allocating some of the other NVMe drive as cache, and tried to reduce RAM usage to reasonable levels, but like I said, I found that I was spending a lot of time fiddling instead of just configuring RAID and have it running just fine in much less time.

[–] MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

You can ignore the RAM usage, it's just cache. It uses up to half your RAM by default but if other things need it zfs will just clear RAM for that to happen.

[–] catloaf@lemm.ee 2 points 2 days ago

That might be what was supposed to happen, but when I started up the VMs I saw memory contention.

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Proxmox only supports btrfs or ZFS for raid

Or at least that's what I thought

[–] MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 2 days ago (3 children)
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[–] tychosmoose@lemm.ee 2 points 2 days ago

Using it here. Love the flexibility and features.

[–] SendMePhotos@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

I run it now because I wanted to try it. I haven't had any issues. A friend recommended it as a stable option.

[–] tfowinder@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 days ago

Used it in development environment, well I didn't need the snapshot feature and it didn't have a straightforward swap setup, it lead to performance issues because of frequent writes to swap.

Not a big issue but annoyed me a bit.

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