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832 TB – ZFS on Linux

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Re: 832 TB – ZFS on Linux

#71

Post by snuxoll »

gribbly wrote: post #59
ethbro wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was an article a bit ago on HN where the Free Software Conservancy (?) wrote that legally, shipping a precompiled binary kernel module is the same as having it in the kernel.

But obviously Canonical's lawyers don't think shipping it separately is the same as shipping it in the kernel, because if they did they would not ship it separately to begin with.

The argument really is based around what constitutes a derivative work. ZFS does not depend on Linux, OpenZFS which ZFS on Linux derives from is an Illumos project first and foremost - does modifying it to plug into the Linux VFS layer make it a derived work of the Linux kernel?

If this ever goes to court it will be an interesting case.

Re: 832 TB – ZFS on Linux

#72

Post by codys »

jjirsa wrote: post #61

Zfs on linux and huge single servers, what could go wrong? It's like a blog written by a 22 year old straight out of college that's never dealt with a real production deployment/failure Zfs on Linux has data loss bugs. There's at least one unpatched and there are bound to be more. Single huge servers eventually fail. Maybe it'll be a drive controller. Maybe it'll be CPU or ram with bit flips as a side effect. Downtim…

> There's at least one unpatched and there are bound to be more.

References, please.

Re: 832 TB – ZFS on Linux

#73

Post by codys »

jjirsa wrote: post #61

Zfs on linux and huge single servers, what could go wrong? It's like a blog written by a 22 year old straight out of college that's never dealt with a real production deployment/failure Zfs on Linux has data loss bugs. There's at least one unpatched and there are bound to be more. Single huge servers eventually fail. Maybe it'll be a drive controller. Maybe it'll be CPU or ram with bit flips as a side effect. Downtim…

It might be worthwhile mentioning that at some point in the past, HN ran on 1 server (and might still do so).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5229522

Re: 832 TB – ZFS on Linux

#74

Post by ethbro »

gribbly wrote: post #69
ethbro wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Granted. But Canonical's lawyers are not canonical. There's legal disagreement, and saying "Ubuntu did it" doesn't make those problems disappear. (Sadly)

>>But Canonical's lawyers are not canonical. Hmm... not sure what you meant by this statement ?

"authorized; recognized; accepted"

I.e. their opinion is not the only opinion on the matter.

Re: 832 TB – ZFS on Linux

#75

Post by johnwfinigan »

ethbro wrote: post #65
chungy wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not exactly, but to any competent administrator, learning FreeBSD based on Linux experience is not that difficult. It's sort of like tasking someone to start working on a program written in Go even if they have only C++ experience. You can cope.

I get a little annoyed with this line of reasoning though. "Anyone can learn anything" doesn't help me if I need an expert now . And it doesn't magically jump the gap between "functional" (I can make a thing work in an ugly and naive way) and "good" (I can weigh the trade-offs behind the scenes and choose the optimal from multiple alternatives). Unless the assertion is that FreeBSD / Go is easy, logical, and/or obvio…

Experts have to get made somehow. It's not as if Linux is a frozen target where you can count on being "productive and community standard-compliant without any effective lag time" without going back to the docs sometimes.

A great example in my opinion: Red Hat RHEL7 introduced systemd. A lot changed versus RHEL6. RHEL6 "experts" turned into clumsy RHEL7 "80%-ers". We figured it out.

Not to even mention that SuSE, RHEL, and Ubuntu are about as similar as "Linux" and FreeBSD, if you are worried about the finer points of best practice. We figure it out.

Re: 832 TB – ZFS on Linux

#76

Post by luckydude »

snuxoll wrote: post #70
luckydude wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm friends with some of the original ZFS guys, Jeff Bonwick was a student of mine at Stanford and I got him to come to Sun, Bill Moore worked for me on BitKeeper. Those guys are seriously studly engineers. I've done file system work at Sun, I don't compare with Bill & Jeff, they are way better. So yeah, trying to do better than those guys is going to be interesting. I'd like to know who is on the RedHat team working…

XFS is the de facto standard file system for RHEL deployments, they employ a lot of engineers familiar with the code and it's the default since RHEL7 came out.

Do you know if they have any of the SGI team? Like Adam and/or Mike?

Re: 832 TB – ZFS on Linux

#77

Post by doublerebel »

tylerjl wrote: post #24
sandGorgon wrote: post #18

The most important line for me was "Today, you can run ZFS on Ubuntu 16.0.4.2 LTS with standard repositories and Canonical’s Ubuntu Advantage Advanced Support. That makes the decision easy." Its highly interesting that Canonical does this with ZFS. I'm not sure why they dont market this more.

I'm only a casual user of ZFS on Linux for personal storage projects, but I've spoken with people who rely very heavily on ZFS on Linux for their small businesses, and it's interesting to hear their perspectives on this. Essentially, because btrfs has failed to deliver on the next-gen filesystem front, ZFS on Linux is such a critical piece of technology that unless Red Hat has an answer soon for out-of-the-box ZFS on…

I have bet on ZFS for years in both business and my most important personal information and it has never let me down, on Illumos or Linux. Snapshots, upgrades, sync, and data transfer are just too easy to even consider switching. And support and features have seen steady improvements over the last decade. No other filesystem has all of these properties.

Re: 832 TB – ZFS on Linux

#78

Post by X86BSD »

ethbro wrote: post #65
chungy wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not exactly, but to any competent administrator, learning FreeBSD based on Linux experience is not that difficult. It's sort of like tasking someone to start working on a program written in Go even if they have only C++ experience. You can cope.

I get a little annoyed with this line of reasoning though. "Anyone can learn anything" doesn't help me if I need an expert now . And it doesn't magically jump the gap between "functional" (I can make a thing work in an ugly and naive way) and "good" (I can weigh the trade-offs behind the scenes and choose the optimal from multiple alternatives). Unless the assertion is that FreeBSD / Go is easy, logical, and/or obvio…

I think your argument lies more in the fact that linux is non standard to Unix. They have gone their own way and made it difficult to transfer knowledge. Ask anyone who has ported a Linux application to any other Unix. It's at best a PITA. At worst a nightmare.

Can you do it? Sure. But it isn't pleasant. The Linux community is off in the weeds imo. Doing their own poor re-implementations of tech others have already done. See: Dtrace, Filesystems, Jails/zones, Networking, VM, Init systems, ...

So I think trying to argue it's easier to install Linux because Linux folks can't transfer their knowledge to other OS's speaks volumes to it being a poor choice to invest skills in if you can't transfer them to other OS's

Re: 832 TB – ZFS on Linux

#79

Post by patrickg_zill »

jjirsa wrote: post #61

Zfs on linux and huge single servers, what could go wrong? It's like a blog written by a 22 year old straight out of college that's never dealt with a real production deployment/failure Zfs on Linux has data loss bugs. There's at least one unpatched and there are bound to be more. Single huge servers eventually fail. Maybe it'll be a drive controller. Maybe it'll be CPU or ram with bit flips as a side effect. Downtim…

Actually the real issue is, "when the system is 65% full and you reboot, how long will it take for ZFS to mount it"?

Perhaps he has split up ZFS into a number of different pools and they can be mounted in parallel (depends on the init script and whether ZFS can do this). But I do recall that larger ZFS pools can take a bit of time to mount; maybe the updated ZFS for Linux is faster....

Re: 832 TB – ZFS on Linux

#80

Post by atmosx »

notpeter wrote: post #21
4ad wrote: post #2

you can run ZFS on Ubuntu [...] You could also build this on Solaris with necessary licensing if you wanted to that route but it’d be more expensive. I find it bewildering the author didn't even consider illumos or FreeBSD, where ZFS is a first class citizen.

It's likely a human resources problem. For every competent FreeBSD or Illumos sysadmin there are 10x equally experienced with Linux. And those numbers are much worse outside of major cities. The commercial support from Ubuntu tips the scales. I made this same decision at my last job. I ran Solaris and Illumos on our file servers and loved it, but a year before I left I ported all the pools to Ubuntu so my successor o…

> For every competent FreeBSD or Illumos sysadmin there are 10x equally experienced with Linux

That's the Nth I've read this quote on HN, it became a classic... You can't find a FreeBSD sysadmin but you can find a Linux admin.

Where I work I have to deal with AIX, Solaris, Open/FreeBSD (Had Net before), Linux (all major flavours) and (god Forbid) Windows Server (2008, 12R2, 2016 and Nano). I've build packages for most of these systems. I don't know all of them inside/out but NEVER had problem implementing/setting/testing features in any of them.

Can you tell me in a what way an intermediate (say 5 years) of experience, linux sysadmin would have problems managing a Free/Open/NetBSD?

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