<html><head><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body dir="auto"><div dir="ltr"></div><div dir="ltr"><br></div><div dir="ltr">Beyond ZFS, you might have a look at boot environments. Alan Jude has given some great talks about this at recent conferences (and accomplished a lot of the work behind the talks, of course).</div><div dir="ltr"><br></div><div dir="ltr"><a href="https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/zfs_powered_magic_upgrades/attachments/slides/3340/export/events/attachments/zfs_powered_magic_upgrades/slides/3340/ZFS_Magic_Upgrades.pdf">https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/zfs_powered_magic_upgrades/attachments/slides/3340/export/events/attachments/zfs_powered_magic_upgrades/slides/3340/ZFS_Magic_Upgrades.pdf</a></div><div dir="ltr"><br></div><div dir="ltr"><a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YcdFln0vO4U">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcdFln0vO4U</a></div><div dir="ltr"><br></div><div dir="ltr">We’re investigating ZFS with boot environment as an idea for a future version of pfsense, with the APU2 and small ARM64 systems as the base (smallest) target.</div><div dir="ltr"><br></div><div dir="ltr"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">With boot environments we can roll forwards or backwards to any release that’s been installed, and not removed. Boot environments also don’t require us to waste space by creating disk partitions, so, even on an 8GB flash we could easily have 20-30 upgrade points, depending again on how much has changed between releases.</span></div><div dir="ltr"><br></div><div dir="ltr"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">If every single bit changed, (which is unlikely), we could only accommodate 8GB/N versions of the system, but, even so, we’d still have a much more flexible system to work with because of the preservation of history and the labeling of the snapshots (releases).</span></div><div dir="ltr"><br></div><div dir="ltr">The experiments on systems as small as 8GB “storage”/4GB “RAM” have panned out thusfar. </div><div dir="ltr"><br></div><div dir="ltr">Jim</div><div dir="ltr"><br></div></body></html>