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▲Show HN: Uberblok – an interactive museum of ZFS internals (uberblok.storagebits.workers.dev)
QuantumNomad_ 3 hours ago [-]
I absolutely love ZFS. I use it on FreeBSD for all disks on the whole system, including the ones that FreeBSD itself is installed on, and I use it with some disks on Linux and with most of my external disks with macOS.

In an alternative universe, Mac OS X would have gotten ZFS shipped with the base install back in 2007, and presumably we’d then still have that to this day. In our universe that ended up not happening even though it was supposed to :/ https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/04/28/revisiting-zfs-for-mac/

I really would have loved to have the whole of macOS running on ZFS. But at least using ZFS from homebrew on macOS to have ZFS on external disks is the next best thing after that, and which we do have.

storagebits 2 hours ago [-]
I forgot that Apple story, a great "what ifs". It's not in the history wing yet, thanks for the link, it might deserve its own panel!
drewg123 3 hours ago [-]
I'd love ZFS a lot more if it weren't for the ARC. Using ARC means that ZFS caches stuff outside the kernel page cache. That in turn means that sendfile is no longer zero-copy when data originates on ZFS, making it a non-starter for content drives for our CDN workload.
ahofmann 2 hours ago [-]
Yes, but this is a Linux/licensing problem. Use one of the BSDs and the ARC doesn't fight with the system cache.
ghm2180 3 hours ago [-]
One small suggestion: Make the code open to the right instead of a new window, that makes it easy to keep context without distraction.
storagebits 2 hours ago [-]
Good idea, thanks! A side panel is the way to go.
ashkankiani 1 hours ago [-]
Building a museum when you self admit you don't understand the internals that well... seems like a conflicting goal? If you're showing off to educate then how can you do that if you don't understand it?

We know the answer, obviously. I can't trust how much of this was something an AI said vs something you actually did seriously look over. At the very least, all of the text on this should've been in your own words, I think. Otherwise this is just show and tell of some prompts.

I wish I could enjoy tech demos anymore, but now they feel so hollow. Which is a real loss from the age of LLMs. I used to enjoy reading the dolphin EMU progress report for years. I wonder what they're up to.

ghostly_s 1 hours ago [-]
If you can't be bothered to copy edit the gratingly AI prose, I can't be bothered to read it.
AyyEye 2 hours ago [-]
> I built

You keep using those words. I don't think it means what you think it means.

storagebits 2 hours ago [-]
Fair hit. "Directed" is closer: agents wrote the code and most of the text, I chose the subject, steered and reviewed.
ByteAtATime 2 hours ago [-]
Inconceivable!
unethical_ban 4 hours ago [-]
As a mere operator, I've been fascinated by ZFS ever since I first heard of it 15+ years ago. It seems so elegant, like it really is the last generalist filesystem one would ever need. Performant, reliable, fundamentals easy to comprehend. I've never tried managing LVM configs because zpools and raidz are just so damned easy. Native encryption. Datasets can be as simple or as complicated as you need them to be. send/recv dataset syncing at the block level vs having to decrypt and sync files individually.

A lot of this goes over my head as someone who isn't familiar with filesystem internals, but I appreciate the effort and the homage to a great tool.

storagebits 3 hours ago [-]
Thanks, that's exactly the reader I'd like to reach, and you're not the first to say it goes over your head. Honestly, I'm still trying to figure out who it doesn't go over the head of. Matt Ahrens, maybe? ^^ Next is a "start here" route: one plain question per room, answered before any code. Copy-on-write and snapshots are probably the best rooms to start with today.
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