zfsbootmenu VS zfs

Compare zfsbootmenu vs zfs and see what are their differences.

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zfsbootmenu zfs
163 752
903 10,954
1.8% 1.6%
8.4 9.8
7 days ago about 16 hours ago
Shell C
MIT License GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

zfsbootmenu

Posts with mentions or reviews of zfsbootmenu. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-07-22.
  • Timeshift: System Restore Tool for Linux
    16 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Jul 2024
  • No more boot loader: Please use the kernel instead
    10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Jul 2024
    As an aside I can heartedly recommend zfsbootmenu for anyone using zfs on linux:

    https://github.com/zbm-dev/zfsbootmenu

  • Bash Debugging
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Mar 2024
    We use a couple nice home-grown functions in ZFSBootMenu to help debug things. We have a zdebug logging function that's peppered liberally throughout the code base - https://github.com/zbm-dev/zfsbootmenu/blob/master/zfsbootme...

    Hitting ctrl-t on our main menu will, when booting with debug logging enabled, show a screen like this: https://imgur.com/Ge75zkP

    We also have a flamegraph profiling mechanism that can be enabled with https://github.com/zbm-dev/zfsbootmenu/blob/master/zfsbootme... . That will dump data to a serial port, which when re-assembled, can be used to produce a graph like https://raw.githubusercontent.com/zbm-dev/zfsbootmenu/master...

    Bash is suprisingly flexible.

  • Pure Bash Bible
    13 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Aug 2023
    A lot of what's in the Pure Bash Bible is horrifically slow. Many of those things are substantially faster, even when paying the cost of starting a new process, when you use an external and commonly available tool. I wrote a bash performance profiler that outputs data in a format that flamegraph.pl recognizes - it really helped identify where we could improve the performance of ZFSBootMenu.

    https://github.com/zbm-dev/zfsbootmenu/releases/tag/v1.12.0

    Don't fall in the trap of thinking things have to be written entirely in bash; it's okay to use other tools to help fill in the gaps.

  • Some preinstalled options/defaults suggestion
    1 project | /r/openSUSE | 24 Jun 2023
    If instead of "opensuse" you're asking for bootloader as grub can't boot from zfs, then, like i metnioned, i don't use grub2, i uninstalled it, instead i'm using https://github.com/zbm-dev/zfsbootmenu
  • ZFSBootMenu how to increase font resolution?
    1 project | /r/zfs | 11 Jun 2023
    I thought the following was supposed to fix this issue: https://github.com/zbm-dev/zfsbootmenu/commit/84da18e64ebcc0c483e7b2c7d3972f7d91784e63
  • How do I configure the refind.conf and refind_linux.conf (and or config.yaml (for ZFSBootMenu)) files properly when installing Arch Linux with ZFS Native Encryption?
    4 projects | /r/zfs | 29 May 2023
    All release assets, including EFI executables and kernel/initramfs pairs, are signed with signify, which provides a simple method for verifying that the contents of the file are as this project intended. Once you've installed signify (that's left as an exercise, although Void Linux provides the signify package for this purpose), just download the desired assets from the ZFSBootMenu release page, download the file sha256.sig alongside it, and run:
  • How to keep Ubuntu from creating a dozen /var subdirectories?
    2 projects | /r/zfs | 8 May 2023
    I think the consensus is that you probably shouldn't be installing a ZFS on root using the native installer anymore. They aren't really maintaining the packages that make that work. Instead the suggestion is to go the zfsbootmenu route of installing.
  • Cloned my root dataset and now it won't boot because NTP daemon can't reach time servers
    1 project | /r/zfs | 5 May 2023
    Glad to hear that everything is working for you! I've opened a PR that adds a warning about this condition - it should likely make it into 2.2.0.
  • Ubuntu 23.04 Desktop's New Installer Set To Ship Without OpenZFS Install Support
    5 projects | /r/zfs | 17 Apr 2023
    You can install following instructions at https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/Getting%20Started/Debian/Debian%20Bullseye%20Root%20on%20ZFS.html which I've automated with https://github.com/HankB/Linux_ZFS_Root/tree/master/Debian. For scripting, you should also look at https://github.com/zbm-dev/zfsbootmenu. I'd probably go that way if I were starting from scratch.

zfs

Posts with mentions or reviews of zfs. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2025-02-03.
  • Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2025)
    24 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Feb 2025
    We develop new features, investigate/fix bugs, and support the community of these important open source infrastructure projects. Some of our recent work includes major ZFS features such as Linux Containers support (OpenZFS 2.2: https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/pull/12263), and Fast Deduplication (OpenZFS 2.3: https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/discussions/15896).

    We successfully hired from HN in the last round and are looking for more OpenZFS Developers (3+ years of experience) to join our team!

    - Strong skills with Kernel C programming and data structures

  • Working with Files Is Hard
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Jan 2025
    There are actually several distinct issues being reported there. I replied responding to everyone who posted backtraces and a few who did not:

    https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/9130#issuecomment-2614...

    That said, there are many others who stress ZFS on a regular basis and ZFS handles the stress fine. I do not doubt that there are bugs in the code, but I feel like there are other things at play in that report. Messages saying that the txg_sync thread has hung for 120 seconds typically indicates that disk IO is running slowly due to reasons external to ZFS (and sometimes, reasons internal to ZFS, such as data deduplication).

    I will try to help everyone in that issue. Thanks for bringing that to my attention. I have been less active over the past few years, so I was not aware of that mega issue.

  • GitHub Linux ARM64 hosted runners now available for free in public repositories
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Jan 2025
    This is excellent news, as it should unblock having precompiled packages available for a number of applications for arm64—for me, most notably, OpenZFS: https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/14511
  • ZFS 2.3.0 released with ZFS raidz expansion
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Jan 2025
    Heavy synchronous IO from incredibly frequent fsync is a weak point. You can make it better using SLOG devices. I realize what I am about to say is not what you want to hear, but any application doing excessive fsync operations is probably doing things wrong, and this is a view that you will find prevalent among all filesystem developers (e.g. the ext4 and XFS guys will have this view too).

    In the case of APT, it should install all of the files and then call sync() once. This is equivalent of calling fsync on every file like APT currently does, but aggregates it for efficiency. The reason APT does not use sync() is probably a portability thing, because the standard does not require sync() to be blocking, but on Linux it is:

    https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/sync.2.html

    That said, slow fsync performance generally is not an issue for desktop workloads because they rarely ever use fsync. APT is the main exception. You are the first to complain about APT performance in years as far as I know (there were fixes to improve APT performance 10 years ago, when its performance was truly horrendous).

    You can file bug reports against ZFS here:

    https://github.com/openzfs/zfs

    I suggest filing a bug report against APT. There is no reason for it to be doing fsync calls on every file it installs in the filesystem. It is inefficient.

  • Nix – Death by a Thousand Cuts
    22 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Jan 2025
    I'm subscribed to this GitHub issue to follow the situation:

    https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/12014

    It might not be the only issue related to ZFS native encryption but, at the very least, as long as this one isn't closed I'm assuming it's still not safe.

  • We fine-tuned Llama and got 4.2x Sonnet 3.5 accuracy for code generation
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Jan 2025
    I would be interested in a fine tune on OpenZFS:

    https://github.com/openzfs/zfs

  • Static search trees: 40x faster than binary search
    15 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 31 Dec 2024
    Your article led me to wonder if our b-trees would be faster if I switched the intra node operations to use Eytzinger ordered arrays:

    https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/commit/677c6f8457943fe5b56d7a...

    There are two ways to look at this Big O wise. One is that insertions and deletions would be asymptomatically faster since memmove() is a linear operation. Look ups would not be any different asymptotically, but the constant factor might improve from being able to do prefetch. The other way is that the N is bounded, such that it is all O(1) and the difference is how big O(1) is.

    I imagine I could implement it and benchmark it. However, my intuition is that the end result have lookups be marginally faster to the point of splitting hairs while insertions and deletions would be slower. While memmove() is a technically a linear time operation, it is a sequential operation that has a very low constant factor. The bubble up and bubble down operations needed to do insertions and deletions in a Eytzinger ordered array are technically random access, which has a higher constant factor. At some point, the Eytzinger ordered array operations should win, but that point is likely well beyond the size of a b-tree node.

    My reason for saying this is to say that Big O notation still matters, but understanding when the constant factor is significant is important.

  • ZFS checksum flaw: Corruption may be left unnoticed
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Dec 2024
  • Bill requiring US agencies to share source code with each other becomes law
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Dec 2024
    It happens. The following repository was originally used only by LLNL before it gained contributors and then was promoted to the OpenZFS repository:

    https://github.com/openzfs/zfs

    If you are not doing multithreading, this sound static analyzer should be fairly useful:

    https://github.com/NASA-SW-VnV/ikos

    Unlike others, it attempts to prove code safety. Unfortunately, it does not currently handle multi-threading and a few other cases.

  • We use our own hardware at Fastmail
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Dec 2024
    Thank you for posting the comment. The process of writing my reply gave me a flash of inspiration:

    https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/pull/16896

    I doubt that this will make us as fast as ext4 is at unlinking files in a single thread, but it should narrow the gap. It also should make many other common operations somewhat faster. There might also be opportunities for further improvements depending on what profiling reveals.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing zfsbootmenu and zfs you can also consider the following projects:

zectl - ZFS Boot Environment manager for Linux

7-Zip-zstd - 7-Zip with support for Brotli, Fast-LZMA2, Lizard, LZ4, LZ5 and Zstandard

root-on-zfs-systemdboot - Dual-boot Root-on-ZFS config for Debian w/ systemd-boot

zstd - Zstandard - Fast real-time compression algorithm

archiso-zfs - Easily load ZFS kernel module on any Archiso.

snapper - Manage filesystem snapshots and allow undo of system modifications

nonguix

sanoid - These are policy-driven snapshot management and replication tools which use OpenZFS for underlying next-gen storage. (Btrfs support plans are shelved unless and until btrfs becomes reliable.)

void-mklive - The Void Linux live image maker

RocksDB - A library that provides an embeddable, persistent key-value store for fast storage.

ramroot - Load root file system to ram during boot.

zrepl - One-stop ZFS backup & replication solution

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Revolutionize your code reviews with AI. CodeRabbit offers PR summaries, code walkthroughs, 1-click suggestions, and AST-based analysis. Boost productivity and code quality across all major languages with each PR.
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