qstaq

Armbian kernel configs (the ones that I have looked at anyway) dont have the config options to build the ZFS modules. You will have to build a new kernel or build the module out of tree
 
Also there is a lot of misunderstanding about ZFS ram use. The main culprit of the seemingly huge ram use of ZFS is the de-duplication feature. If you disable de-duplication then you can run a simple samba / nfs file server with 4-6TB of usable storage in about 650MB RAM. I have even run simple zfs pools on OPi Zero with 512MB RAM with de-dup disabled and a couple of config tweaks using a 1TB SSD over USB for storage, though I would suggest that 750MB RAM is a more sensible minimum
 
The key is to disable de-dup BEFORE you write any data to the pools, disabling afterwards wont lower RAM use. You can also limit the RAM used by setting zfs_arc_max to 25% of system RAM instead of the default of 50% and disable vdev cache with zfs_vdev_cache_size = 0. I have also found that setting Armbian's ZRAM swap to 25-30% of RAM instead of 50% of RAM improves performance. Obviously performance isnt going to be quite as good as a machine with 8GB RAM but the difference isnt that big either

There are license incompatibility problems and patent risks with ZFS on linux. ZFS is CDDL licenses which risks potential patents lawsuits issues for anyone publishing ZFS code contributions with a GPL license. Thats why ZFS will not be in any mainline kernel any time soon. The CDDL license was seemingly designed by Sun to be incompatible with the GPL license. That doesnt mean you cant use ZFS on linux, you just have to use CDDL licensed ZFS to code to be granted Oracles patent protection / immunity. Debian, Ubuntu, etc get round this by shipping the ZFS module as a DKMS built out of tree module and not as part of the kernel
 
I would suggest that there are currently too many problems with ZFS, both from a practical and legal viewpoint, to think about making ZFS a core part of Armbian. Most of Armbian's target hardware is under specified for a default setup of ZFS and proper storage management under ZFS requires much more knowledge than mdraid and ext4 or BTRFS. Its not complex, it just requires you to think and plan more at the deployment stage and have an awareness of some storage concepts that most users dont have knowledge of
 
Now on to the positive news  ZFS is an excellent filesystem and for certain use cases its way more powerful and flexible than BTRFS or any lvm / mdraid / ext4 combination, its also pretty simple to admin once you learn the basic concepts.  Im sure there are a small portion of Armbian users that would get significant benefit from having ZFS available as a storage option. Even better news is that fundamentally every Armbian system already support ZFS at a basic level as both Debian and Ubuntu have the zfs-dkms package already available in the repos. It takes less than 5 minutes to enable ZFS support on any Armbian image just by installing the following packages with apt: zfs-dkms, zfs-initramfs & zfsutils-linux (probably zfsnap is also wanted but not required).  The problem is that the default config will definitely not be suitable for a 1-2GB RAM SBC and we would need a more appropriate default config creating. I still wouldn't recommend ZFS use for the rootfs, if you want snapshots on your rootfs then use BTRFS or use ext4 with timeshift.
 
@Igor @gprovost I would think that the best place to implement this would be as an extra option in armbian-config -> software. I wrote a simple script to install ZFS support and to set some default options for compression, arc, cache, etc for low mem / cpu devices. The same script works without changes on Debian Buster, Ubuntu 16.04, 18.04 & 19.04 as the process is identical on all OS variants as far as I can discern
 
Is https://github.com/armbian/config the live location for the armbian-config utility? If so I will have a look at adding a basic ZFS option in software
 
 

I totally agree with @balbes150.
In my opinion, what he's doing is absolutely great.
Maybe it's easy to forget @balbes150 is doing this for free, and maybe we don't know how many hours he's spending on doing this (I bet some of them, everyday).
 
Thank you, Mr. @balbes150: I think you should be paid by ATVs manufacturers, because, thanks to your work, and only in my case, they have sold 3 Amlogic ATVs (to me); and I had never bought them because of Android: It's your Armbian, the reason
 
To be sincere, I'm happier with my ATV boxes, running @balbes150 Armbian,  than I am with my Raspberrys, covered by tons of dust in this very moment.

I'm not going to waste my time on all the shit that manufacturers shove in their crafts (just to write on them - WiFi available). Want to have WiFi, you have several options.
1. Use normal equipment where there is guaranteed WiFi support.
2. Use external USB WiFi with good support.
3. Themselves add the necessary support for your WiFi.
4. You seek from the seller\manufacturer of your equipment the necessary support.

Looks good! Only thing missing for my linux noobs is a simple tar overview for extracting and creating archives and a simple grep overview
 
Can I win the hat this time please?

There are license incompatibility problems and patent risks with ZFS on linux. ZFS is CDDL licenses which risks potential patents lawsuits issues for anyone publishing ZFS code contributions with a GPL license. Thats why ZFS will not be in any mainline kernel any time soon. The CDDL license was seemingly designed by Sun to be incompatible with the GPL license. That doesnt mean you cant use ZFS on linux, you just have to use CDDL licensed ZFS to code to be granted Oracles patent protection / immunity. Debian, Ubuntu, etc get round this by shipping the ZFS module as a DKMS built out of tree module and not as part of the kernel
 
I would suggest that there are currently too many problems with ZFS, both from a practical and legal viewpoint, to think about making ZFS a core part of Armbian. Most of Armbian's target hardware is under specified for a default setup of ZFS and proper storage management under ZFS requires much more knowledge than mdraid and ext4 or BTRFS. Its not complex, it just requires you to think and plan more at the deployment stage and have an awareness of some storage concepts that most users dont have knowledge of
 
Now on to the positive news  ZFS is an excellent filesystem and for certain use cases its way more powerful and flexible than BTRFS or any lvm / mdraid / ext4 combination, its also pretty simple to admin once you learn the basic concepts.  Im sure there are a small portion of Armbian users that would get significant benefit from having ZFS available as a storage option. Even better news is that fundamentally every Armbian system already support ZFS at a basic level as both Debian and Ubuntu have the zfs-dkms package already available in the repos. It takes less than 5 minutes to enable ZFS support on any Armbian image just by installing the following packages with apt: zfs-dkms, zfs-initramfs & zfsutils-linux (probably zfsnap is also wanted but not required).  The problem is that the default config will definitely not be suitable for a 1-2GB RAM SBC and we would need a more appropriate default config creating. I still wouldn't recommend ZFS use for the rootfs, if you want snapshots on your rootfs then use BTRFS or use ext4 with timeshift.
 
@Igor @gprovost I would think that the best place to implement this would be as an extra option in armbian-config -> software. I wrote a simple script to install ZFS support and to set some default options for compression, arc, cache, etc for low mem / cpu devices. The same script works without changes on Debian Buster, Ubuntu 16.04, 18.04 & 19.04 as the process is identical on all OS variants as far as I can discern
 
Is https://github.com/armbian/config the live location for the armbian-config utility? If so I will have a look at adding a basic ZFS option in software
 
 

Armbian kernel configs (the ones that I have looked at anyway) dont have the config options to build the ZFS modules. You will have to build a new kernel or build the module out of tree
 
Also there is a lot of misunderstanding about ZFS ram use. The main culprit of the seemingly huge ram use of ZFS is the de-duplication feature. If you disable de-duplication then you can run a simple samba / nfs file server with 4-6TB of usable storage in about 650MB RAM. I have even run simple zfs pools on OPi Zero with 512MB RAM with de-dup disabled and a couple of config tweaks using a 1TB SSD over USB for storage, though I would suggest that 750MB RAM is a more sensible minimum
 
The key is to disable de-dup BEFORE you write any data to the pools, disabling afterwards wont lower RAM use. You can also limit the RAM used by setting zfs_arc_max to 25% of system RAM instead of the default of 50% and disable vdev cache with zfs_vdev_cache_size = 0. I have also found that setting Armbian's ZRAM swap to 25-30% of RAM instead of 50% of RAM improves performance. Obviously performance isnt going to be quite as good as a machine with 8GB RAM but the difference isnt that big either