Is it needed/possible to fsck under ZFS ?

[Manish Jain]

On Thu, Apr 20, 2017 at 8:48 PM, Matthew Seaman <matthew at FreeBSD.org> wrote:
TL;DR -- don't worry about fsck with ZFS. It doesn't need any special treatment after an improper shutdown.


Thanks Matthew/others.

This really is a wonderful feature. Although UFS (which is what I have been using for 15 years) in my opinion is as good in terms of performance, ZFS has this advantage of data integrity.

Although ZFS is not easy to setup/maintain for newcomers like me, particularly when the user can only allocate part of an MBR disk already partitioned, migrating has its advantages.

For anyone who wishes to migrate to ZFS using just 2 slices, I can surely help.

My own tertiary system (this one that I am writing from) is a triple-boot MBR system : Windows (ada0s1) + Linux Mint Cinnamon (ada0s2) + FreeBSD_ZFS (ada0s3, UFS prior to migration); with additionally an EBR slice (ada0s4) that has a single and persistent logical partition (ada0s5, ntfs). The logical partition ensures that all data I need is always available to any operating systems that have been installed on the box.

Since I have fairly good skills with Bourne/bash scripting, I used the strategy detailed at https://imil.net/blog/2016/04/28/Migrate-FreeBSD-root-on-UFS-to-ZFS/ to create a set of scripts which take care of the migration from UFS to ZFS.

If anyone needs those scripts/any other help in migrating, please feel free to write to me. The scripts have had 3-4 runs so far; and are certain to work without error. All that the scripts need is an existing FreeBSD (UFS) installation, and a spare slice that is large enough to hold the contents (except what you wish to exclude) of your installation.

Regards
Manish Jain