![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.raspberrypi.org\/homepage-9df4b\/static\/hero-shot-3ad1d131ea382fa6f006b18aefc820aa.png\")
Raspberry Pi 4 Model B<\/p><\/div>\n
Of course, being a brand new Pi to the market, Raspbian Buster is currently the only distribution offering full hardware support. I might reconsider this as other distributions start to catch up and offer support, however my choices are limited right now – hence the comment around perhaps being ahead of the curve.<\/p>\n
So, the Raspberry Pi 4, given it has a bus connected 1Gbps network adapter, and USB 3.0 connectivity looks like it will be a nice fit to send ZFS snapshots to for off-site protection. Attach a USB 3.0 HDD (I’m using a Seagate 5TB portable drive) and configure for ZFS.<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.seagate.com\/files\/www-content\/about\/newsroom\/media-kits\/_shared\/images\/backup-plus-portable-5tb-silver-main-packaging-hi-res.jpg\")
Seagate 5TB Drive<\/p><\/div>\n
I’m not going to go into installing Raspbian on the Pi, there’s plenty of resources around that elsewhere. Let’s assume you have Buster online, updated and ready to install ZFS.<\/p>\n
First of all, you are going to want to add the Debian contrib repository, as the Raspbian repo’s currently do not have all of the ZFS apt packages available. **Update**: I’ve removed the need to grab the keys and add as it’s a debian source, and fixed echoing the line out to sources.list. This worked for me as of May 2020.<\/p>\n
echo deb http:\/\/deb.debian.org\/debian buster contrib >>\/etc\/apt\/sources.list\r\n<\/pre>\nIf you do need to add keys, try the below (big thanks to Colin Ng for helping here!):<\/p>\n
sudo gpg \u2013keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com \u2013recv-key 04EE7237B7D453EC\r\nsudo gpg -a \u2013export 04EE7237B7D453EC | sudo apt-key add<\/pre>\nThen we are ready to install ZFS. This will take a while, as it compiles the ZFS support for your installed Linux kernel.<\/p>\n
sudo apt install -y zfs-dkms zfsutils-linux<\/pre>\nWord of note here. The installer does mention and warn about you installing ZFS on a 32-bit system and it not being recommended. Being SoC is 64-bit capable, I did look for a 64-bit OS but did not turn up much. I proceeded knowing that this could cause issues, but will re-evaluate once a 64-bit distribution comes available for the Pi 4.<\/p>\n
If the install happens to fail – it could be you are missing the kernel headers. Try installing them first then run the previous command again. (Again thanks to Colin Ng for the clarification here!)<\/p>\n
sudo apt-get install raspberrypi-kernel-headers<\/pre>\nOnce complete, either restart your Pi, or you can load the ZFS module:<\/p>\n
sudo modprobe zfs<\/pre>\nNow we should ready to create our ZFS filesystem. If you got any errors in the previous steps, try rebooting and running the commands again.<\/p>\n
You will need to identify the disk(s) you want to create your ZFS pool on. Check for disks using:<\/p>\n
lsblk -f<\/pre>\nOnce you know which disk to you, you can create your zpool:<\/p>\n
sudo zpool create -f <Pool Name> <Disk Path><\/pre>\nFor my setup I did:<\/p>\n
sudo zpool create -f files \/dev\/sda<\/pre>\nThat’s it! You can view the pool by doing:<\/p>\n
zpool list<\/pre>\nNow you can look at configuring your ZFS snapshot replication and testing. More to come on that front.<\/p>\n
General around memory usage – I have found the Pi sits around 750Mb of RAM used, and a load average of 3.30 during ZFS receive operations. Seems pretty reasonable – I am doing lz4 compression on transmission via SSH, and the datasets also have lz4 compression enabled.<\/p>\n
Throughput wise, seems that I am getting just over 60Mb\/s through the network adapter. I am guessing the bottleneck will be the HDD on the Pi. Pretty reasonable given the cost and power consumption of the Pi!<\/p>\n
If you do see slow speeds, make sure your power supply \/ USB cable can provide enough juice to the Pi. I started off with a USB cable plugged into a USB port on a laptop and it was not happy. I kept getting throttled warnings in the \/var\/log\/messages as it was under-voltage. Once I swapped the Pi onto the power adapter for my Nintendo Switch those warnings went away and the performance shot up!<\/p>\n
Will post again with more specifics around getting FreeNAS to replicate to the ZFS pool on the Pi soon. Stay tuned for that!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This has been an interesting one to look at recently – and how wrong was I when I thought that installing ZFS would be as simple as installing the apt package. Turns out I was slightly ahead of the curve…? … Continue reading