File system - UFS or ZFS?

Questions about the installation of FreeBSD
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mechanic
Posts: 23
Joined: Sun Dec 13, 2015 12:54 pm

File system - UFS or ZFS?

Post by mechanic »

This choice comes up part way through the installation process. The UFS option does not provide an editable selection of setup options, I was unable to set a guided UFS option and the editable pathway confused me a lot as the only working options were to delete partitions and make new ones with appropriate mount points. This didn't end up with anything like what I wanted so I restarted the installation and chose a guided ZFS option. This worked well and the install went quickly. But a ZFS setup for a single user and one disk for all boot and file system requirements seems a bit of a sledge-hammer/nut approach.

Is it not possible to setup a guided UFS system with sensible defaults for this simple case?

Another setup which works well here is to use a Linux host and install virtualbox; BSD works well as a virtual machine and the host takes care of all the issues such as wifi which make bare metal installs of FreeBSD so messy. Easy to install without ZFS too!
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ericbsd
Developer
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Joined: Mon Nov 19, 2012 7:54 pm

Re: File system - UFS or ZFS?

Post by ericbsd »

I removed the guided UFS because I do not see the point in installing UFS on GhostBSD when the ZFS default setup on GhostBSD runs well with 2 to 4 Gig of ram.

Also, UFS is not capable of doing boot environment snapshots. Update Station takes advantage of that ZFS feature to create boot environment backup, and a future tool will be created to manage backup with ZFS.
mechanic
Posts: 23
Joined: Sun Dec 13, 2015 12:54 pm

Re: File system - UFS or ZFS?

Post by mechanic »

Yes, snapshots are a great feature!
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