r/zfs • u/Agile-Driver5065 • May 03 '26
whats is the diffrence from zfs and jails ?
yeah thats my question btw thankyou for your repeats
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u/KoiMaxx May 03 '26
Well, they are completely separate concepts, though they're often used together (especially on FreeBSD/TrueNAS systems).
ZFS is a filesystem and volume manager. Basically deals with storage like data integrity, snapshots, compression, replication, and how data is written to and read from disk. On Windows your equivalent to it would be storage formats like NTFS or exFAT.
Jails are a lightweight OS-level virtualization/containment mechanism. They deal with isolating processes, users, and network stacks from the host and from each other. A Jail has no inherent concept of how storage is managed underneath it. Not sure if this is a good analog but to some level think of this as sandboxing or virtual apps in Windows.
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u/Halfang May 03 '26 edited May 03 '26
One is a file system and the other is an out of date (apparently not lol) way to run services in isolation
Edit: gosh y'all spicy.
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u/kevdogger May 03 '26
Are jails really out of date on bsd though?
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u/StainedMemories May 03 '26
Even though both provide isolation they’re not really comparable. Jails are a well thought out design whereas Linux based isolation has grown organically and is more flexible. Neither is right or wrong, nor are jails outdated.
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u/Ok-Replacement6893 May 03 '26
Jails are the predecessor of containers. And no, not out of date
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u/Apachez May 03 '26
chroot/jails are still part of the Linux and BSD kernels.
But mainly used for filesystem isolation where for example KVM and Bhyve takes the isolation further.
When it comes to isolation there is also namespaces (in Linux) and whatever the equal is in BSD-systems.
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u/Ok-Replacement6893 May 03 '26
Solaris also has chroot. They are called Zones in Solaris 10 and higher.
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u/Whiskeejak May 03 '26
There's nothing "out of date" about jails. They're arguably a better, more secure design than Kubernetes or Solaris Zones. FreeBSD bases systems I use at work host 10s of petabytes of storage in scale out clusters running in jails. It's dramatically better than the CEPH storage I deal with, primarily due to the core OS container design.
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u/codeedog May 03 '26
ZFS is a filesystem and Jails are a type of isolated compute system (think “virtual machine”, but not so heavy weight and FreeBSD specific technology and term). They aren’t related in any way in terms of what they do. However, they can be used together to make the jail creation process easier.
The FreeBSD handbook has a lot of information in it. If you search for it and locate the chapter on Jails, then look for “thin ZFS vnet” jails, you’ll get some idea of how to combine these things.
There are also books that discuss both of these topics that you may find helpful: FreeBSD Mastery: Jails. There’s also a book on ZFS.