alt Hacker NewsRun ZFS backed filestore on FreeBSD, have migrated it to/from Debian. At work and home, not petabyte scale but certainly multi hundred terrabyte. Over 15 years, on over 50 hosts/NAS/SAN instances, different hardware.
Run ZFS on Raspberry Pi, on home builds, on Intel, on AMD, on other ARM chipsets.
I think you're over-stating things. Debian is fine for this. I do think FreeBSD is a better platform for myself.
The code bases adhere (modulo ZFS version numbers) to a spec and you can safely migrate the pools between OS. I've done it multiple times both directions.
You can not do this with BTRFS and other Linux things, I consider this feature of (Open)ZFS a killer-context for me: It's OS portable. I wish Mac OSX hadn't walked out of the room when Oracle went legal.
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I guess you can try Windows next - https://github.com/openzfsonwindows/openzfs
Sure you can migrate pools.
Yet everyone is (again) lost in the details and missing the big picture, which is Linux is doing its best to rat fuck OpenZFS at every opportunity, the last of which was the elimination of write_cache_pages in 6.18 behind the GPL iron curtain a mere few months ago.
I don't know about you but I don't want to build my file storage atop hacks on top of more hacks. The kernel has made it clear non-GPL code is not welcome. Struggles will continue in perpetuity. There are better options.
> You can not do this with BTRFS
There is actually a btrfs driver for Windows [0]. I've used it a few times before, and it works surprisingly well. You probably wouldn't want to use it for any serious work, but that's not because it's technically flawed, but more because it isn't extensively tested or commercially-supported.
[0]: https://github.com/maharmstone/btrfs