Next-gen filesystem management

Life used to be so much simpler. A typical desktop computer had one small – and expensive – hard drive with no more than four partitions using standard filesystems like ext2/3. Okay, so half the hardware out there wasn’t supported by Linux, but that just simplified things even further.

Now we have huge hard disks, often more than one of them, and lots of data strewn across them. Simple partition schemes have been replaced with RAID arrays, volume management and multiple filesystem types. Then we start worrying about privacy and start throwing encryption into the mix, and that’s without considering backups. Thanks to the way in which Linux uses block devices, these multiple technologies can be layered on top of one another fairly easily, so we have filesystems on top of LVM volumes on top of LUKS-encrypted devices on top of a RAID array of several hard disks… and it all works well. It can be a bit of a management headache though, with each layer using a different set of software to manage it.

Enter the latest generation filesystems that handle most of this with one software suite. Both ZFS and btrfs provide much of what has already been mentioned, although btrfs doesn’t handle encryption. ZFS was created by Sun and some years ago it released the source code, opening the way for ports to Linux and other OSes. The Linux port was called Zfsonlinux, but the various porting projects have pooled resources as OpenZFS. OpenZFS 2.0 was released recently and this does support