[talk] ZFS v UFS on APU2 msata SSD with FreeBSD

[Jim Thompson]

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).

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://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcdFln0vO4U

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.

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.

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).

The experiments on systems as small as 8GB “storage”/4GB “RAM” have panned out thusfar. 

Jim

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