ZFS-FUSE 0.5.0 was released a few days ago and brought some nice changes. I’ve been using ZFS-FUSE on a number of systems for the purpose of snapshotting the virtual disks of virtual servers. ZFS-FUSE seems to perform well under this scenario. I’d say the major changes are asynchronous IO support, disk barrier support (flushing the write cache), support for zfs send and recv, and a healthy number of bug fixes. I had been using the 0.4.x version straight from the mercurial repository but now I’m switching to this new release. Here are the install steps I followed.

I decided to try ZFS-FUSE is my ongoing attempt to employ filesystem snapshots in my servers. ZFS-FUSE is in beta but I thought I would give it a try and see what happened. The install was not too difficult other than having to install a bunch of library dependencies along the way. These steps may work on other versions of Ubuntu, Debian, or other Debian derived distros but they have only been testing on Ubuntu 8.04.

In thinking about using ZFS under either Fuse/Linux or Nexenta/Solaris I think it's important to note why ZFS is of interest compared to the numerous other upcoming filesystems. I think, for me, what is attractive about ZFS are certain aspects of functionality such as checksumming and filesystem-based snapshots as well as the common set of tools for disk maintenance. While MD and LVM are great pieces of software, their tools are not always the best in my opinion. Although mdadm may be a step up from its predecessors it's not what I would consider intuitive. However, this is all theoretical as I have not actually used ZFS yet. And the servers I build and maintain will continue to be MD/LVM/Ext3 for some time I'm sure.

• The project is not dead.

Excellent. For the rest of the news (good and bad) read ZFS on FUSE/Linux - Status Update.