building ZFS on Fedora 16 is very easy

[marko]

I was just reading this guy's page on building zfs on linux using the source code from the http://zfsonlinux.org/ web page. He did it on Centos 6.2

http://prefetch.net/blog/index.php/2...-linux-server/

I have Fedora 16 x64 and so tried to emulate his steps. But on Fedora 16, the kernel is much newer (I have the 3.2.6 kernel) so the pre-rolled 0.6.0-rc6 spl and zfs tar files he used are too old for Fedora 16.
When I tried I got an error:

too few arguments to function 'filp->f_op->fsync'

the mailing lists showed that was due to the kernel 3.2.6 having changes not in the tar files yet. So I then got the git repos for spl and zfs via git clone. That worked fine and both sets of rpms built and I installed them. This is what I had to do:

su -c 'yum install kernel-devel zlib-devel libuuid-devel libblkid-devel libselinux-devel parted lsscsi'

(I built them both in my home folder in ~/local )
cd ~/local
git clone https://github.com/zfsonlinux/spl.git
git clone https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs.git
cd spl
./configure
make rpm
(this yum install seems necessary to be done here before the zfs 'make rpm' later so it can find
some dependencies)
su -c 'yum install *.x86_64.rpm'
cd ../zfs
./configure
make rpm
su -c 'yum install *.x86_64.rpm'

cd /lib/modules
su -c 'depmod -a'
su -c 'modprobe zfs'

At this point, the loading of the 'zfs' module should pull in all these modules so lsmod | grep zfs shows:

lsmod | grep zfs
zfs 1018354 0
zcommon 43419 1 zfs
znvpair 47131 2 zfs,zcommon
zavl 14376 1 zfs
zunicode 330756 1 zfs
spl 161284 5 zfs,zcommon,znvpair,zavl,zunicode

That's it, at that point I had 'zfs' module installed in the kernel, but since my entire laptop drive is formatted and under use, I can't use it. My main intent was just to try it and get to the point
of having working modules that install.
But for you with space, you'd do the usual ZFS 'zpool create' and so on to make your pools and put them on the device you want.

[marinestu]

Hello Marko

Just a wee mail to say thanks for posting your wee steps on setting up zfs on fedora 16.

Sadly like you I have not space for testing but as we speak I am resizing a lovume to free up some space. I am then going to test for a few weeks and if there are no issues I am going to use zfs as my default filesystem for my storage mountpoint.....will be running some vms off of there too so that couple be really handy.

You do know you could create some blank files and create a zpool for testing using those ?

Thanks again

Stu

[stevea]

First - that's really nice to be able to build zfs - and hopefully you mean a as native filesystem - not fuse.

OTOH - why bother ? Is there any advantage vs btrfs ? The benchmarks I've seen show ZFS losing to btrfs, and not even matching ext4. The feature-set of zfs is closer to btrfs.

[marko]

My instructions in post 1 are for the native zfs source and not zfs fuse, zfs fuse is an official Fedora package so there's no need to build it from source.

This recent (March 2012) article shows some reasons why ZFS is preferred over btrfs
http://www.h-online.com/open/feature...t-1473538.html

The author of that might be a bit extreme but many of his points are common opinions that are holding back enterprise usage of btrfs.

However, oracle is now going to label btrfs as production ready for unbreakable linux 2:
http://www.h-online.com/open/news/it...l-1471706.html

[t0ken]

I can confirm this works.

I lost a FreeBSD machine running ZFS to a bad mobo and needed a way to get my data. I installed Fedora 16 to a VM and built ZFS following OP's steps. Worked like a charm!

[lkeijser]

Wouldn't it have been easier to just install FreeBSD?

Btw, someone from rpmfusion was trying to get both spl and zfs included, but no progress on that for months, unfortunately:

https://bugzilla.rpmfusion.org/show_bug.cgi?id=spl

[t0ken]

Originally Posted by lkeijser

Wouldn't it have been easier to just install FreeBSD?

Lol, actually, yes. In fact I had a PC-BSD VM already installed that I used to make sure I could grab my data. I had a little free time and have been waiting for native ZFS support on linux for a long time, so I figured I'd give it a shot lol.