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Linus: Don't Use ZFS

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Re: Linus: Don't Use ZFS

#191

Post by aidenn0 »

dsr_ wrote: post #51
bayindirh wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly asking, how Btrfs compares to ZFS? There's also Lustre but it's a different beast altogether for a different scenario.

On the surface, btrfs is pretty close to zfs. Once you actually use them, you discover all the ways that btrfs is a pain and zfs is a (minor) joy: - snapshot management - online scrub - data integrity - disk management I lost data from perfectly healthy-appearing btrfs systems twice. I've never lost data on maintained zfs systems, and I now trust a lot more data to zfs than I ever have to btrfs.

Since the plural of anecdote is data, I'll provide mine here. ZFS is the only file-system from which I've lost data on hardware that was functioning properly, though that does come with a caveat.

Twice btrfs ended up in a non-mountable situation, but both times it was due to a known issue and #btrfs on freenode was able to walk me through getting it working again.

With ZFS, I neded up in a non-mountable system, and the response in both #zfs and #zfsonlinux to me posting the error message were, "that sucks, hope you had backups." Since I both had backups and it was my laptop 2000 miles from home that was my only computing device, I didn't dig deeper to see if I could discover the problem. FWIW, I've been using ZFS on that same hardware for almost 2 years since with no issues.

Re: Linus: Don't Use ZFS

#192

Post by malty7301 »

hackmiester wrote: post #155
thu2111 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well ... that sounds initially unreasonable, but then if I think about it a bit more I'm not sure how you'd actually enforce a non-commercial use only license without some basic heuristic like "companies are commercial". Is the expectation here that firms offering software under non-commercial-use-is-free licenses just run it entirely on the honour system? And isn't it true that many firms use unlicensed software, he…

They harass universities about it too. Which is ludicrous, because universities often have residence halls, and people who live there often download VirtualBox extensions.

Their PUEL license even has a grant specifically for educational use.

Re: Linus: Don't Use ZFS

#193

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

bayindirh wrote: post #57
znpy wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

people probably will, in a few years. rotational disks are getting cheaper and cheaper, 10TB disks in two years might cost as little as 2TB disks today (i got a 2TB disk for like 50€ off Amazon).

> people probably will, in a few years. Yes, but without the array as you stated. We have 300+ 10TB disks at our datacenter today and, ZFS is relevant at this disk count, I/O and client load. Running ZFS at small scale is raising a cow at home for a bucket of raw milk. It's more of a fun curiosity rather than a production level operation. I'd run LVM or md or something similar at home instead of a full blown ZFS setu…

LVM/mdraid configuration is much more daunting than ZFS on BSD or Illumos, especially given the Availability of things like FreeNAS

Re: Linus: Don't Use ZFS

#194

Post by bcrosby95 »

shawnz wrote: post #170
throwaway6779 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I remember correctly, the reasoning for the GPL module stuff was/is, that if kernel modules integrate deeply with the kernel, they fall under gpl. So the GPL flag is basically a guideline of what kernel developers believe is safe to use from non gpl-compatible modules

This is the commonly recited argument but I don't believe it was ever proven to be legally necessary. Furthermore, even if it was, it's not clear what level of integration is "too deep". So in practice, it's just a way for kernel developers to add political restrictions as they see fit.

Proven legally necessary, as in, a court telling them to stop doing something? I'm pretty sure they don't want it to get to that point.

Re: Linus: Don't Use ZFS

#195

Post by supercanuck »

shawnz wrote: post #157
supercanuck wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is done strictly for political reasons and has no known legal basis as far as I'm aware. let me stop you right there. This being "Oracle," and its litigious nature, how can you truly be aware or sure? Linus is literally saying there is a legal basis.

> This being "Oracle," and its litigious nature, how can you truly be aware or sure? The functionality I'm describing has absolutely nothing to do with ZFS or Oracle in any way. If you really think the reach of Oracle is so great, then why not block all Oracle code from ever running on the OS? That seems to me to be just as justified as this change.

Oracle sued Google for copying the same names of the functions.

Re: Linus: Don't Use ZFS

#196

Post by thom »

puzzledobserver wrote: post #100
gh123man wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am also not an expert in this space - but if I understand correctly the reason the linux Nvidia driver sucks so much is that it is not GPL'd (or open source at all). There is little incentive for Nvidia to maintain a linux specific driver, but because it is closed source the community cannot improve/fix it. > Why are all drivers expected to use the GPL? I think the answer to this is: drivers are expect to use the G…

I would expect a large fraction of Nvidia's GPU sales to be from customers wanting to do machine learning. What platform do these customers typically use? Windows? How do the Linux and Windows drivers compare on matters related to CUDA?

CUDA works fine, and I have found (completely non-rigorously) that a lot of the time where the workload is somewhat mixed between GPU and CPU you'll get better performance on Linux.

The _desktop_ situation is worse, though perfectly functional. But I boot into Windows when I want battery life and quiet fans on my laptop.

Re: Linus: Don't Use ZFS

#197

Post by mindslight »

kuon wrote: post #153

I don't blame Linus, but I use ZFS a lot. I'll drop ZFS the moment I have an alternative with the same features: - disk management with simple commands that can create raids in any modern configuration - zero cost snapshots - import/export (zfs send/recv) - COW and other data integrity niceties - compression, encryption, dedup, checksums I am very grateful to the OpenZFS community, and I think they deserve praises fo…

> Saying the code is not maintained is quite unfair

IMO it's best viewed as a legal positioning of professing ignorance such that Oracle's thugs don't go after him for "copying" ZFS features, knowingly developing software that will be mixed with CDDL code, etc.

It's similar to how it's not a good idea for an engineer to read patents.

Re: Linus: Don't Use ZFS

#198

Post by wahern »

0x8BADF00D wrote: post #86

Honestly ext4 is fine for most use cases, even SSDs. If you really need more performance look at HAMMER, it’s meant for high availability. At that point you shouldn’t be running Linux anyway, even with RT_PREEMPT it’s not going to be the most performant for those kinds of RTOS workloads anyway.

HAMMER2 is now the default on DragonflyBSD. If I made a bunch of money during the boom and could spend my days doing open source (like Matt Dillon), porting HAMMER2 might be one of the projects I'd pick up.

Re: Linus: Don't Use ZFS

#199

Post by zippergz »

reacharavindh wrote: post #10

As a heavy user of ZFS and Linux, what else is there that even comes close to what ZFS offers? I want cheap and reliable snapshots, export & import of file systems like ZFS datasets, simple compression, caching facilities(like SLOG and ARC) and decent performance.

I know this isn't an option for everyone, but this is part of why I run FreeBSD instead of Linux for servers where I need ZFS.
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