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832 TB – ZFS on Linux

jonkensy.com

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Re: 832 TB – ZFS on Linux

#141

Post by wila »

fnj wrote: post #139
lottin wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the Software Freedom Conservancy ...redistributing a binary work incorporating CDDLv1'd and GPLv2'd copyrighted portions constitutes copyright infringement in both directions... [ https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2016/feb/25/zfs-and-linux/ ] so it seems that Oracle could in fact sue.

> so it seems that Oracle could in fact sue. Says the SFC. But Oracle has had plenty of time and they have not sued. In fact, they have not criticized Canonical for integrating ZFS.

The past is not always a predictable measure for the future, especially as you don't know Oracle's agenda.

They might just wait until there is more money to be gained from a lawsuit or until there's more people already on ZFS who don't want to have anything less.

Re: 832 TB – ZFS on Linux

#142

Post by sandGorgon »

wila wrote: post #141
fnj wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so it seems that Oracle could in fact sue. Says the SFC. But Oracle has had plenty of time and they have not sued. In fact, they have not criticized Canonical for integrating ZFS.

The past is not always a predictable measure for the future, especially as you don't know Oracle's agenda. They might just wait until there is more money to be gained from a lawsuit or until there's more people already on ZFS who don't want to have anything less.

the courts will not allow that. you may claim that you recently discovered that there is infringement or you can claim that you are a new owner of a patent and are enforcing it.

But I dont think courts will take too kindly to someone who knowingly sat without doing something and waited for it to become big.

I would assume that Canonical has already sent infromation about this to Oracle. If they havent done anything now, they cant do anything later.

in fact - https://insights.ubuntu.com/2016/02/18/zfs-licensing-and-lin...

We at Canonical have conducted a legal review, including discussion with the industry’s leading software freedom legal counsel, of the licenses that apply to the Linux kernel and to ZFS.

And in doing so, we have concluded that we are acting within the rights granted and in compliance with their terms of both of those licenses

Re: 832 TB – ZFS on Linux

#143

Post by inopinatus »

drvdevd wrote: post #126
exikyut wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm planning on doing a tiny ZFS pool (once I've finally saved up for it - financials can be fun sometimes!), and was thinking of doing FreeBSD for ZFS and Linux for everything else on top of Xen. I'm currently unsure how to make Linux see the ZFS pool though. I.... don't really like NFS. It's too glitchy in my experience. I use it to listen to music stored on a different machine from my laptop, which uses a long-ran…

You could in theory have a zvol exported from a ZFS pool on FreeBSD to Linux via some remote block dev protocol. iSCSI comes to mind, as it would have to be cross platform. Then slap ext4 on top of that in Linux. The idea feels "janky" though. Lots of overhead compared to just running ZFS on Linux.

Not just in theory. I've done this for a large dev/test Xen cluster (pool was actually on Solaris). Worked well. We made snapshots to match major release tags.

Re: 832 TB – ZFS on Linux

#144

Post by X86BSD »

cyphar wrote: post #131
X86BSD wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

That's not really a fair statement. First of all, Linux started as Linus just reimplementing the Unix semantics, so edge cases and subtle semantics should be expected to be different. Secondly, most Unix-based OSes are barely compatible in their facilities. Sure, you have DTrace (which only macOS, illumos and FreeBSD have) and ZFS (which only illumos and FreeBSD have) but the rest is similarly incompatible. Solairs/i…

Sun's event ports are so similar to kqueue cantrill has said they should have just adopted kqueue.

And there are not different views on zones and jails. They are the same thing. Sun just took the idea of jails and flushed them out further adding a separate network stack for each zone, which jails now also have. But they operate on the same principle and ideas. Jails was bare bones at inception. Jails shared their IP stack with the host, this was before cloud computing and the need for separate network stacks. They both started with being secure and then adding features where the Linux container mess started with features and then continues to try and address the fact they are insecure by design. So jail and zones are similar.

Porting from FreeBSD to Solaris and vice Versa is easier than you think. If it was insanely hard FreeBSD wouldn't have zfs or Dtrace from Sun. Dtrace was almost single handedly ported by one engineer. An amazing engineer, but he Was the only one. Same with ZFS. And illumos ported the FreeBSD installer. Also done by one individual. All very good engineers but still just one.

Re: 832 TB – ZFS on Linux

#146

Post by KaiserPro »

sathackr wrote: post #86
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…

That's something I was thinking about. This thing has to go down occasionally for patches, service, maintenance. 500TB is alot to trust to a single box or two. I'm building a Ceph cluster right now, about the same size as the one in the article, except with 9x36 drive chassis.

Clustered filesystems just means that one machine can wreak havock across many domains of fun. (I used early lustre, I know from fun experience)

ceph seems nice, but appears to be very CPU hungry and not very fast.

Seems easier to have sharded vanilla linux file servers. It requires a decent asset manager, but once you have that, backups and rebalancing become trivial.

Re: 832 TB – ZFS on Linux

#147

Post by yest »

>It’s hard – if not impossible – to beat the $/GB and durability that Amazon is able to provide with their object storage offering.

what the actual fuck?? AWS S3 is a abominable rip off. After I rented to my own dedicated server, I am paying several times less.

Re: 832 TB – ZFS on Linux

#148

Post by acdha »

yest wrote: post #147

>It’s hard – if not impossible – to beat the $/GB and durability that Amazon is able to provide with their object storage offering. what the actual fuck?? AWS S3 is a abominable rip off. After I rented to my own dedicated server, I am paying several times less.

You're running three geographically separated servers with 24x7 monitoring & security, automatic rebuilds, and active bit-rot scrubbing? If not, you're doing a lot less than S3.

It's possible to beat S3 pricing but you either need to be buying a lot of storage or cutting corners to do it. The most common mistake I've seen when people make those comparisons is excluding staff time, followed by presenting a system with no or manual bit-rot protection as equivalent.

Re: 832 TB – ZFS on Linux

#149

Post by johnwfinigan »

ethbro wrote: post #140
johnwfinigan wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, RHE…

Absolutely. It happens. But to harken back to the original post, there are definite advantages to "technology with X experts available in the market" than "technology with Y experts available in the market". Where X > Y. And those advantages don't disappear even if Y is easy to learn.

On that basic point, I agree -- although there are advantages to swimming upstream sometimes. Otherwise, given the landscape of 10-15 years ago, we'd be having this discussion about Windows servers instead of Linux!

Besides, probably the best way to find out if it's a "big deal" is to ask your sysadmins. Or, generally, the people who are going to be stuck running it.

Re: 832 TB – ZFS on Linux

#150

Post by ethbro »

johnwfinigan wrote: post #149
ethbro wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. It happens. But to harken back to the original post, there are definite advantages to "technology with X experts available in the market" than "technology with Y experts available in the market". Where X > Y. And those advantages don't disappear even if Y is easy to learn.

On that basic point, I agree -- although there are advantages to swimming upstream sometimes. Otherwise, given the landscape of 10-15 years ago, we'd be having this discussion about Windows servers instead of Linux! Besides, probably the best way to find out if it's a "big deal" is to ask your sysadmins. Or, generally, the people who are going to be stuck running it.

Granted on the upstream point! Especially with how quick transformative technology goes through its various phases, it may be essential (/Strangelove emphasis) to make the harder choice now so that you're not behind your competitors in the near future.
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