Quick post on installing ZFS as a kernel module, not FUSE, on Debian GNU/Linux. The documents already exist for getting this going, I’m just hoping to spread this to a larger audience, in case you are unaware that it exists.
First, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has been working on porting the native Solaris ZFS source to the Linux kernel as a kernel module. So long as the project remains under contract by the Department of Defense in the United States, I’m confident there will be continuous updates. You can track the progress of that porting at http://zfsonlinux.org.
Now, download the SPL and ZFS sources. I’m running the latest RC, which seems to be quite stable:
$ mkdir ~/src/{spl,zfs}
$ cd ~/src/spl
$ wget http://github.com/downloads/zfsonlinux/spl/spl-0.6.0-rc8.tar.gz
$ cd ~/src/zfs
$ wget http://github.com/downloads/zfsonlinux/zfs/zfs-0.6.0-rc8.tar.gz
At this point, you will need to install the dependencies for SPL, then go ahead and compile and make the necessary .deb files:
$ sudo aptitude install build-essential gawk alien fakeroot linux-headers-$(uname -r) $ cd ~/src/spl $ tar -xf spl-0.6.0-rc8.tar.gz $ cd spl-0.6.0-rc8 $ ./configure $ make deb
Now do the same for ZFS:
$ sudo aptitude install zlib1g-dev uuid-dev libblkid-dev libselinux-dev parted lsscsi $ cd ~/src/zfs $ tar -xf zfs-0.6.0-rc8.tar.gz $ cd zfs-0.6.0-rc8 $ ./configure $ make deb
You should have built both the SPL and ZFS Debian packages, at which point you can install:
$ sudo dpkg -i ~/src/{spl,zfs}/*.deb
If you’re running Ubuntu, which I know most of you are, you can install the packages from the Launchpad PPA https://launchpad.net/~zfs-native.
A word of note: the manpages get installed to /share/man/. I found this troubling. You can modify your $MANPATH variable to include /share/man/man8/, or by creating symlinks, which is the approach I took:
# cd /usr/share/man/man8/ # ln -s /share/man/man8/zdb.8 zdb.8 # ln -s /share/man/man8/zfs.8 zfs.8 # ln -s /share/man/man8/zpool.8 zpool.8
Now, make your zpool, and start playing:
$ sudo zpool create test raidz sdd sde sdf sdg sdh sdi
It is stable enough to run a ZFS root filesystem on a GNU/Linux installation for your workstation as something to play around with. It is copy-on-write, supports compression, deduplication, file atomicity, off-disk caching, encryption, and much more. At this point, unfortunately, I’m convinced that ZFS as a Linux kernel module will become “stable” long before Btrfs will be stable in the mainline kernel. Either way, it doesn’t matter to me. Both are Free Software, and both provide the long needed features we’ve needed with today’s storage needs. Competition is healthy, and I love having choice. Right now, that choice might just be ZFS.