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

311–320 of 571 posts

Re: Linus: Don't Use ZFS

#311

Post by ploxiln »

dathinab wrote: post #284
ploxiln wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's exactly that, when combined with the longstanding practice of maintaining compatibility with userspace, but reserving the right to refactor kernel-space code whenever and wherever needed. If ZFS-on-linux breaks in a subtle or obvious way due to a change in linux, he can't afford to care about that - keeping the linux kernel codebase sane while adding new features, supported hardware, optimizations, and fixes at…

> he can't afford to care about that - keeping the linux kernel codebase sane while adding new features, supported hardware, optimizations, and fixes at an honestly scary rate, is not that easy. Maybe, but the complains seem to be more related to the (problematic) changes not being of technical nature accidentally braking ZFS, but being more of political nature. With speculation that it might have been meant to _inte…

Linus is rather tolerant (or apathetic) about non-GPL modules, but what he doesn't care to do is ensure that there is an appropriate set of non-GPL-marked exports available for external modules. If some other developer happens to mark some export GPL and it happens to be one key export needed by a non-GPL external module, Linus doesn't care, because he doesn't care about external modules.

This has come up many times in the past. Keep in mind that linux has always been GPLv2-only, it is not LGPL or anything like that.

https://lwn.net/Articles/769471/

https://lwn.net/Articles/603131/

https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/2/7/451

Re: Linus: Don't Use ZFS

#312

Post by quantummkv »

pizza234 wrote: post #132
btilly wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here are his reasons for generally avoiding ZFS from what I consider most important to least. - The kernel team may break it at any time, and won't care if they do. - It doesn't seem to be well-maintained. - Performance is not that great compared to the alternatives. - Using it opens you up to the threat of lawsuits from Oracle. Given history, this is a real threat. (This is one that should be high for Linus but not…

I'm baffled by such arguments. > It doesn't seem to be well-maintained. The last commit is from 3 hours ago: https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/commits/master . They have dozens of commits per month. The last minor release, 0.8, brought significant improvements (my favorite: FS-level encryption). Or maybe this is referred to the 5.0 kernel (initial) incompatibility? That wasn't the ZFS dev team's fault. > Performance…

> There are no (stable) alternatives. BTRFS certainly not, as it's "under heavy development"¹ (since... forever).

Unless you are living in 2012 on a RHEL/CENTOS 6/7 machine, btrfs has been stable for way too long. I have been using btrfs as the sole filesystem on my laptop in standard mode, on my desktop as RAID0 and my NAS as RAID1 for more that two years. I have experienced absolutely zero data loss. Infact, btrfs recovered my laptop and desktop from broken package updates many times.

You might have had some issues when you tried btrfs on distros like RHEL that did not backport the patches to their stable versions because they don't support btrfs commercially. Try something like openSUSE that backports btrfs patches to stable versions or use something like arch.

> That's true, however, the amount is breakage is no different from any other out-of-tree module, and it unlikely to happen with a patch version of a working kernel (in fact, it happen with the 5.0 release).

This is a filesystem that we are talking. In no circumstances will any self respecting sysadmin use a file system that has even a small change of breaking with a system update.

Re: Linus: Don't Use ZFS

#313

Post by quantummkv »

cookiecaper wrote: post #268
liuliu wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

bcachefs should be heavily supported, it doesn't get nearly enough for what it supposes to do: https://www.patreon.com/bcachefs

Honestly just use ZFS. We've wasted enough effort over obscure licensing minutia.

> Honestly just use ZFS. We've wasted enough effort over obscure licensing minutia.

I am willing to bet that Google had the same thought. And I am also willing to bet that Google is regretting that thought now.

Re: Linus: Don't Use ZFS

#314

Post by beatgammit »

Youden wrote: post #56
jessant wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does btrfs met your requirements?

I've tried btrfs without much luck. btrfs still has a write hole for RAID5/6 (the kind I primarily use) [0] and has since at least 2012. For a filesystem to have a bug leading to dataloss unpatched for over 8 years is just plain unacceptable. I've also had issues even without RAID, particularly after power outages. Not minor issues but "your filesystem is gone now, sorry" issues. [0]: https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/in…

Why use RAID5/6, RAID10 is much more safe because you drastically reduce the change of a cascading resilvering failure. Yes, you get less capacity per drive, but drives are (relatively) cheap.

I thought I wanted RAID5, but after reading horror stories of drives failing when replacing a failed drive, I decided it just wasn't worth the risk.

I currently run RAID1, and when I need more space, I'll double my drives and set up RAID10. I don't need most of the features of ZFS, so BTRFS works for me.

Re: Linus: Don't Use ZFS

#316

Post by jauer »

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.

Facebook runs on btrfs: https://facebookmicrosites.github.io/btrfs/docs/btrfs-facebo...

Re: Linus: Don't Use ZFS

#317

Post by beatgammit »

nabla9 wrote: post #109

Honestly, at this point if I can't get ZFS in Linux I would move to FreeBSD whenever I need big filesystem. How does Linux® Binary Compatibility layer work on FreeBSD?

The main thing I want is for OnlyOffice or Collabora to work on FreeBSD in some capacity and I haven't been able to do it (both have open issues that receive very little attention). I want to run my self hosted office solution on the same machine as the data, and I'd really rather avoid VMs.

So, I use Linux because Docker and BTRFS work just fine for me use case. I prefer FreeBSD, but unfortunately I'm unable to solve my problems easily with just FreeBSD, so I'm using something else.

Re: Linus: Don't Use ZFS

#318

Post by beatgammit »

squarefoot wrote: post #269

So what would be a viable ZFS alternative on a Linux based NAS I'm planning to build in a few months? I'm currently running Nas4Free on a giant rack sized thing I built using a Mini-ITX Atom board years ago, and ZFS works like a charm, but I also intend to move some day to the ARM architecture which unfortunately the *BSD based NAS software doesnt support (yet). I'm tempted by this smaller hardware in particular: htt…

I use BTRFS and it works fine. Just don't use RAID5/6 and you should be good to go.

I've also heard success stories using ZFS on Linux, but I haven't bothered because I'd just rather use something that's in the kernel instead of something outside it.

Re: Linus: Don't Use ZFS

#319

Post by quantummkv »

prakhunov wrote: post #307
sterlind wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nvidia proprietary drivers work OK for me, mostly (I needed to spoof the video card ID so KVM could lie to the Windows drivers in my home VFIO setup, but it wasn't hard.) But it means I can't use Wayland. Wayland isn't critical for me, but since NVidia is refusing to implement GBM and using EGLStream instead, there's nothing I can do about it. It simply isn't worth NVidia's time to make Wayland work, so I'm stuck usi…

No you can use Wayland as long as your window manager/environment supports GBM. Gnome and KDE both do (Which for most Linux users is all that is needed). Now you can't use something like Sway but their lead developer is too evangelical for my taste so even if I had an AMD/Intel card I would never use it.

> No you can use Wayland as long as your window manager/environment supports GBM.

You can do that on Intel and AMD drivers and other open source graphics drivers, which due to being open source allow 3rd parties like redhat to patch in GBM support in drivers and mesa when required.

Nvidia driver does not support GBM code paths. Therefore wayland does not work on nvidia. And because nvidia driver is not open source, someone else cannot patch GBM in.

Re: Linus: Don't Use ZFS

#320

Post by [deleted] »

quantummkv wrote: post #312
pizza234 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm baffled by such arguments. > It doesn't seem to be well-maintained. The last commit is from 3 hours ago: https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/commits/master . They have dozens of commits per month. The last minor release, 0.8, brought significant improvements (my favorite: FS-level encryption). Or maybe this is referred to the 5.0 kernel (initial) incompatibility? That wasn't the ZFS dev team's fault. > Performance…

> There are no (stable) alternatives. BTRFS certainly not, as it's "under heavy development"¹ (since... forever). Unless you are living in 2012 on a RHEL/CENTOS 6/7 machine, btrfs has been stable for way too long. I have been using btrfs as the sole filesystem on my laptop in standard mode, on my desktop as RAID0 and my NAS as RAID1 for more that two years. I have experienced absolutely zero data loss. Infact, btrfs…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN