391–400 of 571 posts
"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.
Certainly about a decade ago the ZFS' chief architect, Jeff Bonwick, and Linus have met:
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A former employer was threatened by Oracle because some downloads for the (only free for noncommercial use) VirtualBox Extension Pack came from an IP block owned by the organization. Home users are probably safe, but Oracle's harassment engine has incredible reach.
My employer straight up banned the use of VirtualBox entirely _just in case_. They'd rather pay for VMWare Fusion licenses than deal with any potential crap from Oracle.
VirtualBox itself is GPL. There is no lawsuit risk.
What requires "commercial considerations" is the extension pack.
The extension pack is required for:
> USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 devices, VirtualBox RDP, disk encryption, NVMe and PXE boot for Intel cards
If licensing needs to be considered (ie. in a corporate environment), but one doesn't need the functionalities above, then there's no issue.
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Many of the advanced features aren't implemented yet though, like compression, encryption, snapshots, RAID5/6....
why would you want to embed raid5/6 in the filesystem layer? Linux has battle-tested mdraid for this, I'm not going to trust a new filesystem's own implementation over it. Same for encryption, there are already existing crypto layers both on the block and filesystem (as an overlay) level.
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Isn't this a problem for any over provisioned storage pool ? You can avoid that if you want by not over provisioning & checking space consumed by CoW snapshots. Also what does ZFS do if you run out of blocks ? I have actually managed to run out of blocks on XFS on thin LV and it's an interesting experience. XFS always survoved just fine, but some files basically vanished. Looks like mostly those that were open and be…
>Isn't this a problem for any over provisioned storage pool ? ZFS doesn't over-provision anything by default. The only case I'm aware of where you can over-provision with ZFS is when you explicitly choose to thin provision zvols (virtual block devices with a fixed size). This can't be done with regular file systems which grow as needed, though you can reserve space for them. File systems do handle running out of spac…
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ZFS, on Solaris, not robust? ZFS for “play”?! This... is just plain uninformed. Not just me and my employer, but many (many) others rely on ZFS for critical production storage, and have done so for many years. It’s actually very robust on Linux as well - considering the fact that freeBSD have started to use the ZoL code base is quite telling. Would freeBSD also be in the “play” and “not robust” category as well, hang…
Performance wasn't robust, especially on dead disks and rebuilds, but also on pools with many (>100) filesystems or snapshots. Performance would often degrade heavily and unpredictably on such occasions. We didn't loose data more often than with other systems. "play" comes from my distinct impression that the most vocal ZFS proponents are hobbyists and admins herding their pet servers (as opposed to cattle). ZFS come…
I’ve only used zfs in two or three way mirror setup, on beefy boxes, where the issues you describe are minimal. Also JBOD only.
The thing is that without checksumming you’ve actually no idea if you lose data. I’ve had several pools over the years report automatic resilvering on checksum mismatches. Usually it’s been disks acting up well before smart can tell, and reporting this has been invaluable.
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Keep in mind that RAID5 isn’t feasible with multi-TB disks (the probability of failed blocks when rebuilding the array is far too high). That said, RAID6 also suffers the same write-hole problem with Btrfs. Personally I choose RAIDZ2 instead.
> Keep in mind that RAID5 isn’t feasible with multi-TB disks (the probability of failed blocks when rebuilding the array is far too high). What makes you say that? I've seen plenty of people make this claim based on URE rates, but I've also not seen any evidence that it is a real problem for a 3-4 drive setup. Modern drives are specced at 1 URE per 10^15 bits read (or better), so less than 1 URE in 125 TB read. Even…
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My experience is that linux nvidia drivers are better than the competitors open source drivers.
Is that experience recent? AMD drivers used to be terrible and Intel isn't even competition.
No doubt someone more knowledgeable about Linux could fix this issue, but I never had any issues with my nVidia blobs. That's not to say nVidia don't have their own issues.
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. Pretty sure this is false. ZFS does support trim (FreeBSD had trim support for quite a while, but ZoL has it now as well), as well as supporting l2arc and zil/slog on ssd. > ZFS partitions are also almost impossible to resize You can grow zfs partitions just fine (and even online expand). You just can't shrink them.
Here's his reasoning: "honestly, there is no way I can merge any of the ZFS efforts until I get an official letter from Oracle that is signed by their main legal counsel or preferably by Larry Ellison himself that says that yes, it's ok to do so and treat the end result as GPL'd. Other people think it can be ok to merge ZFS code into the kernel and that the module interface makes it ok, and that's their decision. But…
Btrfs crashed for me on two occations, last time, around 2 years back I have installed zfs (which I am using for ~10 years on FreeBSD server) which works like a charm since then. I understand Linus reasoning but there is just no way I will install btrfs, like ever. I rather dont update kernel (I am having zfs on fedora root with degular kernel updates and scripts which verify that everything is with kernel modules pr…