221–230 of 571 posts
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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.
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 agree that ZFS has a lot to offer. But the legal difficulties in merging ZFS support into the mainline kernal are understandable. It's a shame but I think he is making the right call.
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> And I'm not at all interested in some "ZFS shim layer" thing either If there is no "approved" method for creating Linux drivers under licenses other than the GPL, that seems like a major problem that Linux should be working to address. Expecting all Linux drivers to be GPL-licensed is unrealistic and just leads to crappy user experiences. nVidia is never going to release full-featured GPL'd drivers, and even corpor…
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 think parent comment wasn't asking for third party, non-GPL drivers to be mainlined, but for a stable interface for out-of-tree drivers.
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Last time I used ZFS write performance was terrible compared to an ordinary RAID5. IIRC Writes in a raidz are always limited to a single disk’s performance. The only way to get better write speed is to combine multiple raidzs - which means you need a boatload if disks.
We had a bunch of Thumpers (SunFire X4200) with 48 disks at work, running ZFS on Solaris. It was dog slow and awful, tuning performance was complicated and took ages. One had to use just the right disks in just the right order in RaidZs with striping over them. Swap in a hotspare: things slow to a crawl (i.e. not even Gbit/s). After EoL a colleague installed Linux with dmraid, LVM and xfs on the same hardware: much f…
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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…
My experience is that linux nvidia drivers are better than the competitors open source drivers.
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Linus' reasons for not integrating ZFS are absolutely valid and it's no doubt that ZFS can never be included in the mainline kernel. There's absolutely no debate there. However the person he is replying to was not actually asking to have ZFS included in the mainline kernel. As noted above, that could never happen, and I believe that Linus is only bringing it up to deflect from the real issue. What they were actually…
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
Saving and restoring registers is an astoundingly generic function. If you list all the kernel exports and sort by how much they make your work derivative, it should be near the very bottom.
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> But it is a problem that you can't reliably have out-of-tree modules. That is the bit I'm trying to get at. Yes it would be best if ZFS was just part of Linux, and maybe some day it can be after Oracle is dead and gone (or under a new leadership and strategy). But it's almost beside the point. Every other OS supports installing drivers that aren't "part" of the OS. I don't understand why Linux is so hostile to this…
I'm not sure Linux is especially hostile. A new OS version of, say, Windows can absolutely break drivers from a previous version.
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> There are no (stable) alternatives. BTRFS certainly not, as it's "under heavy development"¹ (since... forever). Note that they don't mean "it's unstable," just "there are significant improvements between versions." Most importantly: > The filesystem disk format is stable; this means it is not expected to change unless there are very strong reasons to do so. If there is a format change, filesystems which implement t…
Some features such as Raid5 were still firmly in "don't use if you value your data" territory last I looked. So it is important to be informed as to what can be used and what might be more dangerous with btrfs