The ZFS file system delivers huge capacities, RAID mirroring, and anti-corruption mechanisms right out of the box. Learn how to install Ubuntu with ZFS, and how to create a mirrored pool.
ZFS is an advanced file system that originated at Sun Microsystems for use with their Solaris operating system. Following Oracle’s acquisition of Sun in 2009, ZFS is now under Oracle Corporation ownership.
However, in a typical act of altruism, from 2005 onwards, Sun released an open source version of ZFS. Inevitably, this was ported to Linux where it gained wider exposure. The open source version of ZFS—openZFS—is managed and maintained by the OpenZFS project.
ZFS is a high-capacity, fault-tolerant file system. ZFS originally stood for Zettabyte File System. The ZFS architecture is based on 128 bits instead of the more common 64 bits of other files system. Being able to work with larger numeric values is one of the factors that made ZFS capable of handling zettabytes of storage. To give you an idea of what that means, a zettabyte is a billion terabytes.
Nowadays, ZFS supports file storage of up to 256 zebibytes. A zebibyte (270 bytes) is larger than a zettabyte (1021 bytes), but not by an order of magnitude. There’s much more to ZFS than sheer capacity—as mind-boggling as that is. ZFS functions as its own volume manager and RAID controller. It has built-in functions such as true copy on write that protect your data from corruption. It combines features that deliver file system pooling, cloning and copying, and its RAID-like functionality, natively.
Ubuntu has offered ZFS for some years now, but always with warnings and caveats. In Ubuntu 20.10 the warnings were removed. Canonical officially supports ZFS but only in full disk setups. To get that support you’ll need to install ZFS as you install Ubuntu. The ZFS options are still tucked away, but they’re there and no longer just for the intrepid or foolhardy.
With Ubuntu 21.10 due in October 2021, it’s a good time to see how the ZFS offering in Ubuntu is maturing.