I do work with a lot of small files, but I'm not sure if I'm really getting performance gains anymore with newer nvme drives. I might do a benchmarking post at some point. I do have a single Gen5 M.2 slot, so I might go to a single drive later down the line.
@djsumdog Props to you, sir! With Gentoo, no less! I’ve got an ancient HP Microserver NAS running ZFS - it was on TrueNAS, but with their abandonment of TrueNAS Core I’ve been playing with XigmaNAS. My initial install was not ZFS on root, I’ve been meaning to go back and re-do it when I have time.
..but I still have the HP in the closet (it's very slow; no hardware encryption support). I had been running FreeBSD on the new one, and it did save me from some data corruption due to bad ram a few years back:
Two years ago I switched to this rackmount system and put Alpine on it. It still uses ZFS with native encryption for storage, but the main drive is plain old ext4.
Yep, that's the one I have (you see it briefly in that video I linked). I had the OS drive up there too, but I think I put the optical drive back in when I put it in storage .. also added a half-height video card with DisplayPort/HDMI since I didn't have any VGA monitors 😅
I have 14TB ~ 23TB drives now. Native encryption full backups took 2~4 days 🤣 ... there are unofficial firmware hacks to get SATA3 working on them as well (the SATA2 is another bottleneck)
@djsumdog Mine is the HP N40L, with four vertical drives arranged across the front (although I have the fifth, a boot drive, stashed in space above). And yes, it has an AMD Turion processor that lacks hardware AES; this isn’t a deal breaker for me, as I encrypt ZFS on the source and do raw ZFS send to the NAS box. It is of course possible to do encrypt/decrypt on the NAS, but it uses 60% of the CPU!
zfsbootmenu uses systemd-boot's UEFI shim to build itself.
zfsbootmenu incorporates fzf and some other tooling to give you a list of all your kernels and ZFS pools. I've never used gummibooot/systemd-boot by itself, so not sure if it can do the same, but zfsboot feels cozy and well documented.
Yes. Just add the boot USE flag for systemd-utils. That will install the stub at /usr/lib/systemd/boot/efi/linuxx64.elf.stub.
There's a zfsbootmenu package that also has the EFI image generator too (that will use your own kernel), but I kept getting build errors so I used the release binary from their website. The package is still helpful because it contains all the ZFS scripts needed for dracut to load your encrypted ZFS root pool.
@djsumdog@RedTechEngineer have Gentoo devs finally made it so you can pull systemd-boot into your system despite running an OpenRC profile? Back when I used to do the same thing I kept a gummiboot ebuild and built zfsbootmenu against it.