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openzfs
openzfs-docs
Python2021–2026
openzfs / openzfs-docs

openzfs-docs

OpenZFS Documentation

Learning & Reference
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
10Distinct people
10Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
171GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

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What it is

OpenZFS Documentation

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

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Also in these discussions

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This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year10 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2021-08-27 07:48:48 UTC to 2026-09-15 18:31:49 UTC.

0123452021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20212022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20232024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 2 submissions, 3 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC523
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

10 sources
FrostKiwi·Jan 14, 2025
Have my server infrastructure on NixOS. Huge boost in productivity and stability, would never go back to standard linux. But man if something breaks it's a nuke going off. Sry for the long post, but thought I share my experience: Mass storage on a big encrypted RaidZ array of spinning rust, no issues. Bootloader, /boot, Encrypted Root and Databases on Mirrored NVME Drives. And man is that a nailbiter on each update. Setup my drives during 22.11 following NixOS Root on ZFS instructions [1], which were amended following reports of systems becoming unbootable [2] and mostly removed later [3]. Besides initially being a broken setup [4] with an increasing amount of mounts each update stalling any system writes and causing updates to fail, it became a well running machine after that was fixed. Then during the 24.05 update and with no config cha
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nge, the system became unbootable [5]. After a tough recovery [6] I never figured out how to do mirrored bootloaders again, switched to a single bootloader setup. To this day I have interactions I don't understand and am trying to fix [7], which sometimes causes updates to knock services offline due to the `nixos-rebuild switch` process stopping services, going to update the bootloader, failing due to missing mounts and exiting with services being offline, prompting manual intervention. [1] https://github.com/openzfs/openzfs-docs/blob/1211e98faf1f37a... [2] https://github.com/openzfs/openzfs-docs/commit/1211e98faf1f3... [3] https://github.com/openzfs/openzfs-docs/commit/4fb5fb694f44c... [4] https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/214871 [5] https://github.com/openzfs/openzfs-docs/issues/531 [6] https://github.com/openzfs/openzfs-docs/issues/531#issuecomm... [7] https://discord.com/channels/568306982717751326/132854109967...
In Nix – Death by a Thousand Cuts
frankjr·Oct 1, 2024
> On https://github.com/openzfs/openzfs-docs/issues/494 people unanimously agree that zfs native encryption is broken especially when sending or receiving raw encrypted zfs snapshots, and they blame the zfs leadership for refusing to admit that zfs native encryption is buggy because admitting that it is buggy is bad for the reputation of zfs. More details on this can be found in a gist from the same author (keep in mind he's a well known zfs commmiter). https://gist.github.com/rincebrain/622ee4991732774037ff44c67...
In ZFS native encryption is currently broken for encrypted backups
amano-kenji·Oct 1, 2024Submission

ZFS native encryption is currently broken for encrypted backups

There are various issues on ZFS native encryption. ZFS native encryption has been especially buggy when raw encrypted zfs snapshots are being sent or received. https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/11679 https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/15989 https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/15924 https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/labels/Component%3A%20Encryption https://www.reddit.com/r/zfs/comments/10n8fsn/does_openzfs_have_a_new_developer_fo… On https://github.com/openzfs/openzfs-docs/issues/494 people unanimously agree that zfs native encryption is broken especially when sending or receiving raw encrypted zfs snapshots, and they blame the zfs leadership for refusing to admit that zfs native encryption is buggy because admitting that it is buggy is bad for the reputation of zfs. zfs native encryption has been fine for local usage on
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my machine, but I have never attempted to send raw encrypted zfs snapshots due to numerous warnings. Thus, I want to offer alternatives to zfs native encryption. 1. If your zfs pool is not large, LUKS is going to be faster than zfs native encryption. I don't know whether LUKS is going to be still faster if zfs pool contains many disks. ZFS native encryption can be as fast as LUKS or faster than LUKS, but it is not for now. 2. For making incremental encrypted backups, I recommend restic. Restic can make incremental encrypted snapshots of ZFS snapshots. You can delete any restic incremental snapshots without losing data in other snapshots. Restic 0.17 started supporting RESTIC_FEATURES=device-id-for-hardlinks which supports backing up $ZFS-MOUNTPOINT/.zfs/snapshot/$SNAPSHOT-NAME efficiently. Restic 0.18 will remove device-id-for-hardlinks feature flag and support .zfs/snapshot directories efficiently witout any feature flag. If you want to back up zfs dataset, you can take restic ZFS snapshot, back up .zfs/snapshot/restic as a new restic snapshot, and delete restic ZFS snapshot after backing it up. In this way, restic doesn't need to know about local sanoid ZFS snapshots which are independent from restic snapshots. Restic supports compression, encryption, and deduplication. Thus, you can send incremental encrypted backups to untrusted machines. For remote backups, you can use amazon cloud storage, https://rsync.net, https://zfs.rent, and other cloud storage services. I don't have any association with any of these services. I don't recommend any. Do your own research if you want to pick a cloud storage provider.
17 points · Open discussion
justinclift·May 9, 2024
It sounds like the author is using ZFS encryption. If that's the case, then doing so with replicated ZFS snapshots is probably not a good idea. That specific scenario (ZFS encryption -> replication of encrypted snapshots) is a known cause of ZFS corruption. :( https://www.phoronix.com/news/OpenZFS-Encrypt-Corrupt Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be widely known about, though there is a suggestion to make it official: https://github.com/openzfs/openzfs-docs/issues/494
In Disaster Recovery with ZFS and Zrepl
transpute·Feb 13, 2024
12 Feb 2024, https://www.phoronix.com/news/OpenZFS-Encrypt-Corrupt and https://github.com/openzfs/openzfs-docs/issues/494 > A new ticket has been opened for OpenZFS as well in proposing to add warnings against using ZFS native encryption and the send/receive support in production environments. "Among experienced zfs users and developers, it's conventional wisdom that zfs native encryption is not suitable for production usage, particularly when combined with snapshotting and zfs send/recv. There is a long standing data corruption issue with many firsthand user reports...Additionally, if you join #zfs or #zfsonlinux on freenode and mention that you're having an issue with zfs native encryption, you'll be met with advice from developers that zfs native encryption is simply not reliable." From Phoronix comments, a suggestion on implementat
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ion: > It should be something like that: ERROR: RAID 5/6 support has know problems and shouldn't be used on production systems. If you really want to use it please type "Enable dangerous RAID5/6 support" or add argument "--enable-dangerous-raid56-support" to this command
In OpenZFS bug reports for native encryption
HankB99·Dec 1, 2023
I'm a little sad to see this. I've been using ZFS on my PCs for years with minimal issue and significant benefits. [1] I've even contributed [2]. And I remain a huge fan. I don't believe that "everyone is just guessing". There are some pretty knowledgeable folk that work on this. [1] I've triggered some corruption in snapshots on an encrypted pool. No permanent problems resulted and no data was lost. [2] I provided a very minor documentation fix that was encouraged and promptly merged. https://github.com/openzfs/openzfs-docs/pull/472
In In OpenZFS and Btrfs, everyone was just guessing
sandreas·Aug 27, 2021
For nearly one month now I am working on switching from MacOS to linux desktop and after experimenting a lot, the switch is pretty near. I'm using a Lenovo T460s WQHD, and the most important advice I could give you: - First try with a VM is ok, but if you really plan to switch, try on REAL HARDWARE - most of the issues I had was not using hardware with Linux support (e.g. Wifi) - Don't try to "rebuild" MacOS or Windows - change the mindset to linux - Plan a huge amount of time (weeks) for getting a neat set up and try at least for 4 Weeks, before you give up - Make a list of what are really MUST have features at the end and keep it as short as possible - Understand at least the fundamentals of the boot process, the X Server, Desktop Environments/Window Managers/Display Managers, Terminal / Shell / TTY - Don't switch distro too
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early - if something does not work, try to stick to your choice and fix the problems For everyone who's interested, I ended up using Artix Linux (Arch, no systemd) with encrypted ZFS on boot and KDE as desktop environment, and I'm pretty happy so far. Resources I recommend are: https://github.com/openzfs/openzfs-docs/blob/91d28894a74a19f... https://int3ractive.com/blog/2018/make-the-best-of-macbook-t... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exQh0_JKBJQ https://github.com/esjeon/krohnkite https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2eYFnH61tmytImy1mTYvhA
In I switched from macOS to Linux after 15 years of Apple

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