Hey,

I am planning to implement authenticated boot inspired from Pid Eins’ blog. I’ll be using pam mount for /home/user. I need to check integrity of all partitions.

I have been using luks+ext4 till now. I am hesistant hesitant to switch to zfs/btrfs, afraid I might fuck up. A while back I accidently purged ‘/’ trying out timeshift which was my fault.

Should I use zfs/btrfs for /home/user? As for root, I’m considering luks+(zfs/btrfs) to be restorable to blank state.

  • I have been using btrfs for years, and love it. I chose it over zfs mainly because I found the tooling easier and more straightforward, and concepts less complex. It’s been a long time, but I also believe btrfs was in mainline and zfs wasn’t, and having reliable access to rescue tools was important - any complexity like having to build my own rescue disks was highly undesireable. I also vaguely remember zfs needing regular maintenance back in the day, which would have influenced my decision. I’ve also liked that btrfs tools have smart defaults, such as detecting SSDs and auto-setting healthy defaults. I’m not a sysadmin, and have no interest in being one, so I value features like these.

    Anyway, I’ve had ext3 and ext4 corruption issues several times over the years, but have had no issues with any btrfs filesystems. I’ve used it on platters, SSDs, SD cards, USB sticks – except for vfat and iso9660 for specialty devices, I can’t say I’ve chosen anything other than btrfs for over a decade, and I’ve a few ext4 partitions to btrfs in fury after corruptions, repairs, and restores.

    I’m sorry I can’t compare btrfs to zfs; zfs has probably fixed the tooling warts and licensing issues that I remember from years ago, by now. Lots of people like it, so both are good choices.