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The Future of ZFS in FreeBSD

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Re: The Future of ZFS in FreeBSD

#61

Post by agumonkey »

loeg wrote: post #39
tivert wrote: post #6

> In the past few years the vast majority of new development in ZFS has taken place in DelphixOS and zfsonlinux (ZoL). Earlier this year Delphix announced that they will be moving to ZoL https://www.delphix.com/blog/kickoff-future-eko-2018 This shift means that there will be little to no net new development of Illumos. So, basically, Delphix was a (the only?) commercial user of Illumos and now they're abandoning it f…

> It also sounds like FreeBSD also lacks the resources to maintain an implementation of something like ZFS, which is ironic since not too long ago it seemed like one of the marquee features they had that Linux didn't. There's no contradiction here. FreeBSD was never the primary contributor to (Open)ZFS (it was an Illumos thing), but we had the resources to make it a first class citizen on FreeBSD at a time when Linux…

freebsd code base would be to be a marquee feature to me

Re: The Future of ZFS in FreeBSD

#62

Post by h1d »

zapzupnz wrote: post #56
h1d wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple already has apfs.

And? How's this relevant?

I mean, there's unlikely to be any official support of zfs on Mac and the fact Apple developed apfs recently could mean there's less appetite for community to port and support zfs on Mac.

Re: The Future of ZFS in FreeBSD

#63

Post by rleigh »

chasil wrote: post #21
carlavilla wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the ZFS FreeBSD code are going to be taken from ZoL, what's the difference of use ZFS on FreeBSD and GNU/Linux?

FreeBSD can bundle it in the installer, and put the root filesystem in a ZFS dataset. Because of GPL incompatibility with the CDDL, Linux cannot do this. A compliant installer must put root on something else, usually ext4 or xfs. A Linux installer iso putting root in a zfs dataset opens a terrible legal door.

Of course Linux can do this. I'm writing this very reply on a Linux system booted directly off a ZFS dataset.

    % zfs list rpool/ROOT/default 
    NAME                 USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT
    rpool/ROOT/default  14.8G  60.1G  11.9G  /
Support for this exists in GRUB and initramfs-tools, and it works perfectly.

The GPL is not an EULA. It's a distribution licence. There is absolutely no problem in using ZFS on your system, and there's no legal restriction on what an installer may or may not do.

Re: The Future of ZFS in FreeBSD

#64

Post by b2ccb2 »

There are some interesting comments further in the mail thread from Matthew Ahrens (co-creator of ZFS) and Alan Jude (has recently been working on getting zstandard into ZFS) that give more insight.

Matthew Ahrens[1]:

…Being "upstream" is more a matter of degree than an absolute ordering. In the past, most ZFS features have originated in illumos, and those changes have been ported to the other platforms (notably FreeBSD and ZoL). Looking forward, we see more features originating in ZoL. The OpenZFS community (including FreeBSD) is working to put in place technical processes to ensure that new ZFS features are available on all platforms. The original post in this thread was a proposal for how to do that.

Alan Jude[2]:

…The way that things have evolved over the last few years means it would be much more difficult to just import changes from ZoL. ZoL was originally far behind the OpenZFS repo, but as they were catching up, they were also fixing bugs and adding features. So there is not really a common point in the source we could start from to import ZoL commit by commit.… The biggest thing to remember is that this is still OpenZFS, and still run by the same developers as it has been. We are just commonizing on the repo that has the most features integrated into it.

[1] https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2018-Dec...

[2] https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2018-Dec...

Re: The Future of ZFS in FreeBSD

#65

Post by zapzupnz »

h1d wrote: post #62
zapzupnz wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And? How's this relevant?

I mean, there's unlikely to be any official support of zfs on Mac and the fact Apple developed apfs recently could mean there's less appetite for community to port and support zfs on Mac.

I don't see how. Those who want ZFS probably want to use specific features of it or for specific purposes but don't want to have to stop using macOS to continue working with ZFS volumes.

Re: The Future of ZFS in FreeBSD

#66

Post by jmarneweck »

qaq wrote: post #40
loeg wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh, the rumors I've heard all say Joyent's use of illumos is not long for this earth.

So Bryan Cantrill (CTO) and all the former Sun eng. will abandon SmartOS @ Joyent?

I doubt that Joyent/Samsung will abandon their work on-top of Illumos. They contribute work upstream to Illumos.

They continue to port code to Illumos (i.e. KVM, continued work on Pluribus port of bhyve, etc.).

SmartOS is what their data centre orchestration solution gets built on-top of.

You can see their changelog for SmartOS they are quite active: https://us-east.manta.joyent.com/Joyent_Dev/public/SmartOS/s...

Development of SmartOS and Triton Datacentre occur under their joyent organisation on GitHub.

Re: The Future of ZFS in FreeBSD

#67

Post by BurningCycles »

p_l wrote: post #32
chasil wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless and until Oracle relicenses ZFS in compatible terms. My theory on how this might happen is an independent implementation of BtrFS that extends from ZFS code, sharing it whenever possible. Should such a thing emerge and surpass current BtrFS, what else could Oracle do but throw in the towel?

Oracle is not capable of relicensing OpenZFS, as they do not hold the copyright for it past code that is common between ZFS v28/ZPOOL v5 and OpenZFS. From my understanding both Linus and ZoL team prefer to be separate.

>From my understanding both Linus and ZoL team prefer to be separate.

I sincerely doubt that. If Oracle would relicense/dual license ZFS as GPLv2 compatible then I feel convinced that the ZoL contributors would happily do so as well.

I can't think of a single reason why they would not want to be in mainline Linux, and I have seen nothing indicating that the Linux kernel devs would be anything but happy to have it 'mainlined' as it would only make Linux better.

Of course this all hinges on Oracle, which makes it extremely unlikely in my opinion.

Re: The Future of ZFS in FreeBSD

#68

Post by gsnedders »

zapzupnz wrote: post #55
h1d wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or they just figured they wanted a file system that also works on mobile devices (apfs even works on watchOS) with limited memory.

I could wear the ZFS thing was from so long ago that APFS wouldn't even have been a glimmer in an Apple engineer's eye. 10.5 or 10.6?

Yeah, there was a period between ZFS not happening and APFS really starting, as far as one can tell.

Re: The Future of ZFS in FreeBSD

#69

Post by BurningCycles »

h1d wrote: post #42
chasil wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I understand it, including ZFS requires all linked code to be bound by the CDDL, which the GPL cannot do. https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2016/feb/25/zfs-and-linux/ "[§]3.1 … Any Covered Software that You distribute or otherwise make available in Executable form must also be made available in Source Code form and that Source Code form must be distributed only under the terms of this License. … "[§] 3.4 … You may no…

But Ubuntu figured it was ok to ship with zfs. https://blog.ubuntu.com/2016/02/18/zfs-licensing-and-linux Though FSF doesn't seem to support it. https://www.fsf.org/licensing/zfs-and-linux And a few HN posts regarding the Ubuntu's announcement. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11125063 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11240402

>But Ubuntu figured it was ok to ship with zfs.

Yes, but it's shipped as a separate kernel module (as in separate file) rather than built into the Linux kernel. As for the legality of this, it can really only be determined in court, which hopefully won't happen since I can't think of anyone who would want to prevent Linux from using ZFS now that Sun is gone.

It would be great if it could eventually be part of Linux mainline which would then allow it to easily be used on boot volumes as well. That would require dual/relicensing though, since Linus Torvalds have said that CDDL code will not be merged with mainline (most likey a result of consultation with Linux Foundation lawyers).

Re: The Future of ZFS in FreeBSD

#70

Post by cyphar »

p_l wrote: post #32
chasil wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless and until Oracle relicenses ZFS in compatible terms. My theory on how this might happen is an independent implementation of BtrFS that extends from ZFS code, sharing it whenever possible. Should such a thing emerge and surpass current BtrFS, what else could Oracle do but throw in the towel?

Oracle is not capable of relicensing OpenZFS, as they do not hold the copyright for it past code that is common between ZFS v28/ZPOOL v5 and OpenZFS. From my understanding both Linus and ZoL team prefer to be separate.

Oracle is capable of changing the terms of the CDDL though (the CDDL has an auto-update clause), which would effectively allow for it to be replaced with a GPL-compatible version and it would affect all code put under that license (no matter who the copyright holder is). This is the same process that they used to switch from CDDLv1 to CDDLv2 for all their projects (though the only change was who had the right to change the license terms -- from Sun to Oracle).

But it's unlikely they'll do it. In recent years they've relicensed-under-GPL some things (like the DTrace userspace utilities) but I have doubts they'd ever do it for something like ZFS.

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