Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Linus: Don't Use ZFS

realworldtech.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 571 posts

Re: Linus: Don't Use ZFS

#241

Post by ggm »

montjoy wrote: post #83
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.

Hardware RAID controllers can do most if not all of these things.

I've lost more data in hardware RAID than in ZFS but I have lost data in both.

Hardware RAID has very poor longevity. Vendor support and battery backup replacement collide in BIOS and host management badly.

Disclaimer: I work on Dell rackmounts, which means rather than native SAS I am 'Dells hack on SAS' which is a problem and I know its possible to 'downgrade' back to native.

Re: Linus: Don't Use ZFS

#242

Post by tobias3 »

donmcronald wrote: post #125
maximente wrote: post #58

i wouldn't use ZFS either. my guess is 90% of ZFS users have never run failure scenarios and grappled with potential failure modes of ZFS, nor even know that you really need ECC RAM to run ZFS without fear of existential data corruption due to bit flips. furthermore, the allure of ZFS means people aren't testing their disaster plans until it's too late, bc ZFS is "resilient". lastly, data recovery is expensive as all…

> you really need ECC RAM to run ZFS without fear of existential data corruption due to bit flips https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1235679&p=... http://www.open-zfs.org/wiki/User:Mahrens

The problem is that ZFS doesn't have an offline repair tool. A (granted unlikely) bit flip in an important data structure that gets written to disk makes the whole fs unmountable and that's it (idk if it has a tool to rescue file data from a unmountable pool? Maybe we should ask Gandi...).

With e.g. ext4 you can get back to a mountable state pretty much guaranteed with e2fsck. You might loose a few files, or find them in lost+found, etc. but at least you have something.

The reason ZFS doesn't have a offline repair tool is pretty convincing. Once you have zettabytes (that's the marketing) of data, running that repair tool will take too long, so you'd have to do everything to prevent that in the first place anyway. Including checksumming everything, storing everything redundantly and using ECC RAM.

Re: Linus: Don't Use ZFS

#243

Post by ggm »

bromonkey wrote: post #27

"Don't use ZFS. It's that simple. It was always more of a buzzword than anything else, I feel, and the licensing issues just make it a non-starter for me." - Linus I have a strong feeling Linus has never actually used ZFS.

I also think he took a reasonable licence issue and conflated it with personal opinion not backed by experience. Nobody who has actually run ZFS says its just buzzwords.

Re: Linus: Don't Use ZFS

#244

Post by ggm »

I kind of wish somebody with money took Oracle into court on ZFS and established it doesn't have Oracle taint, so we can move on. Java would be good too but that fight went to the wrong point of law to argue. Opensolaris .. I feel meh about but perhaps it too needs this.

Money doesn't solve all problems, but money can solve legal problems c/f the lawsuits people like newegg do, to get rid of the IPR leeches. (And cloudflare?)

Re: Linus: Don't Use ZFS

#246

Post by Polylactic_acid »

smileybarry wrote: post #172
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…

IIRC VirtualBox offers to download the Extension Pack without stating it's not free for commercial use. There isn't even a link to the EULA in the download dialog as far as I can tell (from Google Images, at least). Conversely, VirtualBox itself is free for commercial use. Feels more like a honeypot than license auditing. They can also apply stronger heuristics, like popping up a dialogue box if the computer is centr…

Wait is this the pack that gets screen resizing and copy/paste working?

Re: Linus: Don't Use ZFS

#247

Post by magicalhippo »

denkmoon wrote: post #143
zelly wrote: post #138

He's not wrong. ext4 is actually maintained. This matters. ZFS hasn't kept up with SSDs. ZFS partitions are also almost impossible to resize, which is a huge deal in today's world of virtualized hardware. Honestly Linus's attitude is refreshing. It's a sign that Linux hasn't yet become some stiff design-by-committee thing. One guy ranting still calls the shots. I love it. Protect this man at all costs.

"ZFS hasn't kept up with SSDs." What does that mean?

ZFS (or at least ZoL) doesn't scale well to NVMEs:

https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/issues/8381

Re: Linus: Don't Use ZFS

#248

Post by geoff-dot »

Are there any lawyers that can verify the legal claims made? Anyone can file a lawsuit at anytime for whatever reason, that doesn't mean the lawsuit is valid. Sure using ZFS on your home system or even a small implementation is not a big deal but if there's a company with money lawsuits happen.

I would think the wide availability and usage of ZFS and the fact that this is no longer 20 years ago when companies would sue as if they were 19th century tycoons there must be some sort of "well you let ZFS be used this long without suing you can't just let it be open for so long and then sue when it is profitable" sort of statue in American law. Again I'm not a lawyer and I know enough about law to know I do not know enough about law.

Re: Linus: Don't Use ZFS

#249

Post by magicalhippo »

tobias3 wrote: post #242
donmcronald wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you really need ECC RAM to run ZFS without fear of existential data corruption due to bit flips https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1235679&p=... http://www.open-zfs.org/wiki/User:Mahrens

The problem is that ZFS doesn't have an offline repair tool. A (granted unlikely) bit flip in an important data structure that gets written to disk makes the whole fs unmountable and that's it (idk if it has a tool to rescue file data from a unmountable pool? Maybe we should ask Gandi...). With e.g. ext4 you can get back to a mountable state pretty much guaranteed with e2fsck. You might loose a few files, or find the…

AFAIK it stores multiple copies of those important data structures though, so should take more than a single bit flip.

Re: Linus: Don't Use ZFS

#250

Post by m4rtink »

disordinary wrote: post #202
LaGrange wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

There's differing opinions of BTRFS's suitability in production - it's the default filesystem of SUSE on one hand, on the other RedHat has deprecated BTRFS support because they see it as not being production ready and they don't see it being production ready in the near future. They also feel that the more legacy linux filesystems have added features to compete.

Check what features of BTRFS SUSE actually uses and considers supported/supportable.
Post reply on HN