[selfhoster1312]

I've been curious about ZeroFS. My usecase is running a real POSIX filesystem on top of garage for integration with non-S3 services. I've had very bad (short) experiment with JuiceFS (1). Is it worth benchmarking `zerofs mount` with garage?

My usecase is NAS storage of many small files + some big files (think big shared SMB for a non-profit). I need:

- fsync durability (as promised on zerofs homepage), including sqlite durability (so NFS is out of the question)

- inotify support for external script integration (did not find an issue/docs about this)

- support for reading/writing small blocks without hammering the CPU/disks (benchmarked with JuiceFS using torrents and was catastrophic)

Do you think ZeroFS currently makes a good candidate? If not, is the described usecase part of the ZeroFS roadmap?

(1) https://git.deuxfleurs.fr/Deuxfleurs/garage/issues/1021

[pierrebarre]

Yes, I think it’s worth benchmarking.

zerofs mount has durable fsync and fcntl byte-range locking.

Inotify works for changes made through the local mount. It won’t report changes made through another client, though.

Small writes operate on 32 KiB extents. Partial overwrites are read-modify-write, but the FUSE writeback cache helps combine them, and the resulting extents are packed into segments rather than producing one S3 PUT per write.

I’d be interested in the results if you try it.

[selfhoster1312]

Thanks for the extra info, i will definitely come back to you when i have some results. It won't probably be until the end of the summer though, before i find the chance to put back online a test server.

[snapplebobapple]

Did you get garagefs to work well? I ended up moving to rustfs for my plakar and restic backup station because the performance was abysmal on garage. i also dont really get the point of zerofs. Seems like you are building a posix fs on top of s3 that is built on top of a posix fs... seems like a lot of extra steps that probably degrade performance vs just backing up that first posix fs semi regular.

[pierrebarre]

> i also dont really get the point of zerofs. Seems like you are building a posix fs on top of s3 that is built on top of a posix fs

That can literally be the stack, but the same argument could be made about object storage itself: it ultimately writes data to local disks, so why not write files there directly?

The value of object storage isn’t just its API. It’s the durability, distribution, failure handling, and capacity behind that API. ZeroFS lets POSIX applications use those properties. Its server and cache are replaceable and the bucket remains the source of truth.

If one machine and its disks are enough for your data and reliability needs, then yes, a local filesystem is simpler. ZeroFS isn’t intended to improve that case.

[selfhoster1312]

garage was working fine in other scenarios but it really had pathological behavior with the small read/write with torrenting benchmarks. (see my previous link for detailed benchmarking)

The reason for me for trying this setup was to provide native S3 features for apps that support it, while still supporting POSIX semantics for other apps (we have a few), while replacing native RAID with a multi-server storage backend to extend available space, and potentially removing the need for backups for most of the non-critical data once it's replicated across different sites.

I never got NFS/SMB to saturate a Gbit/s LAN link, and other solutions like cephfs/glusterfs seemed more complex and did not necessarily have all the features (inotify/fsync).

I never tried rustfs but was particularly interested in garage for the "philosophy" of development: developed by academics with proper R&D, fully FLOSS, with low-end hardware and unstable links/sites in mind, aiming for technological degrowth. From the looks at the rustfs website, it looks like the opposite of that.

You are right i was trying to overengineer things. For now i still run RAID0 (+ backups for important data).

[snapplebobapple]

I think it's those small writes that was making garagefs perform so badly and rustfs perform a lot better. My setup sounds like a different scale than yours though. It's my home lab running on questionable hardware. As truenas apps for rustfs/garagefs. I use cephfs on my proxmox cluster and it's honestly not that great if you have a lot of small files either (which I do because of things like screenshots in jellyfin/music players/etc). My rustfs setup is not clustered either. It's just single node