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Linux 5.1 Arrives

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Re: Linux 5.1 Arrives

#11
post #7

> The first of these is Linux now supports persistent memory as RAM. Sure, non-volatile memory (NVM) isn't as fast as good old RAM, but on newer systems it gives you the option of expanding your memory. That sounds like swap. What's the difference?

I think that this article explains it somewhat: https://lwn.net/Articles/777212/

Basically there's Intel Optane DIMM which costs less than DRAM and offers good enough performance, so you can use Optane with DRAM as a cache and those patches provide proper Linux support for that scheme.

Re: Linux 5.1 Arrives

#13
Oh goodie, I get a new kernel version to compile repeatedly for the next few days.

If any of you are successfully rocking Linux on an LG Gram (especially the 17Z990), and you have decent ACPI support, I'd loooooooove to see your kernel config file. Please.

Re: Linux 5.1 Arrives

#14
post #7

> The first of these is Linux now supports persistent memory as RAM. Sure, non-volatile memory (NVM) isn't as fast as good old RAM, but on newer systems it gives you the option of expanding your memory. That sounds like swap. What's the difference?

Swap has to get paged into real RAM when there is a page fault (presumably evicting something else). I'm guessing that this is actually mapping the NVM directly into the process, so individual loads and stores write directly to the device instead of actual RAM.

Re: Linux 5.1 Arrives

#16
post #2

Whats the current status of the situation between the ZFS-on-Linux project and Linux 5.1+?

How is ZFS in general vs btrfs? ZFS is basically killed by Oracle right?

No, OpenZFS is alive and thriving and we use it in production on many Centos systems.

btrfs is a awful. We used it for a brief time on a production system with vanilla mirrored drives. Absolutely horrible. I will never use btrfs for anything ever again. I've been running unix systems for 30 years; even the darkest days of UFS was not that bad.

Re: Linux 5.1 Arrives

#18
post #2

Whats the current status of the situation between the ZFS-on-Linux project and Linux 5.1+?

How is ZFS in general vs btrfs? ZFS is basically killed by Oracle right?

ZFS on Linux is where the majority of ZFS innovation is these days. Btrfs should be permanently deleted except for a sole copy in a museum somewhere as an example of a historical mistake negatively affecting millions of people.

Re: Linux 5.1 Arrives

#19
post #2

Whats the current status of the situation between the ZFS-on-Linux project and Linux 5.1+?

How is ZFS in general vs btrfs? ZFS is basically killed by Oracle right?

Broad general statements are always difficult but FWIW:

- btrfs is fine if you want checksumming for your external HDD with some backup stuff that is mostly sequential i/o.

- For everything else - especially anything that goes beyond a single disk use ZFS. btrfs RAID1 is not really raid1 but rather oddness of pid decides which drive to read from, raid5,6 had serious issues a while back - the write hole problem still exists for btrfs. ZFS stripe, mirror, raidz are well understood and work flawless afaik. btrfs also does strange things when replacing disks, like going read-only when one disk fails - at least it used to be that way.

- performance is a mixed bag but broadly speaking for anything that is not sequential io on an empty disk btrfs is slower than other filesystems[1], for ZFS it depends can be slower or faster than ext4 depending on a lot of settings...

- ZFS tooling is far superior to btrfs - I've used both a lot and you won't go back to btrfs tooling once you've used ZFS.

- btrfs snapshots degrade performance with rising snapshot count. ZFS works fine.

- ZFS has native encryption with zfs send / recv support in the upcoming 0.8.0. So you can do encrypted differential backups this way.

- btrfs quota was for a long time broken and error-prone, not sure what the current status is but it never worked correctly for me.

- ZFS lacks cp --reflink and linux pagecache integration as well as sendfile() on Linux and the ZFS ARC is independed of the pagecache - that has some consequences for e.g. mmap().

- ZVOLs are ZFS only you can create block devices as ZFS datasets i.e. zfs create -V 10G rpool/xfs && mkfs.xfs /dev/zvol/rpool/xfs && mount /mnt /dev/zvol/rpool/xfs can be useful for ceph, running docker on xfs volumes in container

- btrfs works fine inside containers so you can run Docker in LXD/LXC - ZFS is not there yet - overlay2 support is also missing.

- no io-scheduling via cgroups for ZFS afaik because the Linux queue subsystem is not used...

- Last but not least: ZFS has ZIL & L2ARC. ZIL is huge for spinning disks because sync() writes are first written to an ssd storage and later async and sequential to the hdd. TL;DL: apt update and databases are fast even on spinning disks. L2ARC is an SSD-Cache but it's not so effective in my experience (low hitrate for typical hosting stuff)

- Personally I will avoid using btrfs if I can.

1: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=freebsd-... it's a little bit apples/oranges because ZFS Freebsd != Linux ZFS but IMHO it shows that the architecture/design is sound.

Re: Linux 5.1 Arrives

#20
post #2

Whats the current status of the situation between the ZFS-on-Linux project and Linux 5.1+?

I don’t think the kernel people have reverted their ZoL-hostile changes, if that’s what you’re asking about.

That said: ZoL works with Linux 5.0, but AFAIU that’s due to ZoL falling back to less optimal code. I know it works because I run both on my laptop.

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