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Linus: Don't Use ZFS

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Re: Linus: Don't Use ZFS

#401

Post by nickik »

ggm wrote: post #243
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.

The license issue is not actually so clear. The actual license is a good one. Oracle itself it the bigger problem.

Re: Linus: Don't Use ZFS

#402

Post by nickik »

esjeon wrote: post #327

Don't go too far people. Linus's criticism against ZFS is concise: buzzword & licensing. Here, Linus is putting emphasis on license, not technical whatever details of ZFS. He clearly doesn't use ZFS and is not even interested in the problem ZFS solves. He is only "interested" is his (and community's) control over the ZFS source code. So, his logic basically becomes this: ZFS is not mainline-able, so veto it until Ora…

Actually what stops mainline integration is the believe of the community in the strength of open source licensing.

Re: Linus: Don't Use ZFS

#403

Post by nickik »

rubyn00bie wrote: post #114

Or do use ZFS, just know that Oracle sucks and you have to go through hoops because of it... Also, while ZFS for me has been performant, that seems like a silly reason to decide to use it or not use it. I think ZFS pools and snapshots would be among the deciding factors to use it or not. FWIW, as some other commenters have said, I'd rather drop Linux than drop ZFS. I'm actually only even running Linux on my home serv…

Oracle has not actually done anything yet. Its the lack of believe in the license.

Re: Linus: Don't Use ZFS

#404

Post by llcoolv »

eitland wrote: post #282
bigiain wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there is no conceivable reason that Oracle would want to threaten me with a lawsuit. Money. Anecdotally that's the primary reason Oracle do anything.

If anyone thinks this is hyperbole : I worked for a tiny startup (>2 devs full time) where Oracle tried to extract money from us because we used MariaDB on AWS. If you think this sounds ridiculous you probably got it right. (Why? Because someone inexperienced with Oracle had filled out the form while downloading the mySQL client.)

Well... Serves you about right for choosing MySQL over PostgreSQL :)

Re: Linus: Don't Use ZFS

#405

Post by nickik »

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…

> ZFS is the ultimate "pet" in the pets vs. cattle continuum. in a world where shoddy engineering and "break things fast" is the zeitgeist,

Live storage is never 'cattle', that is idiotic your running filesystem IS actually a pet. Harddrives are 'cattle' and that's exactly what ZFS treats like 'cattle'.

ZFS was born out of long frustrations with file system and was systematically designed to protect against data corruption and bad hardware. It is literally the exact opposite of 'move fast and break things'.

Go and actually watch the videos where the designer show it for the first time. It speaks very clearly about how and why they designed it.

> i would not risk any of my personal treasured data to ZFS due to inherent existential threats. i would implore ZFS users to evaluate and test their setups, and especially use ECC RAM - like, starting now - to protect their assets.

ZFS has always recommended ECC to its users. No filesystem can protect you from not having it.

Re: Linus: Don't Use ZFS

#406

Post by mnw21cam »

HorstG wrote: post #394
awused wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

ZFS does overprovision all filesystems in a zpool by default. Create 10 new filesystems and 'df' will now display 10x the space of the parent fs. A full fs is handled differently than your volume manager running out of blocks. But the normal case is overprovisioning.

That's not really overprovisioning. That's just a factor of the space belonging to a zpool, but 'df' not really having a sensible way of representing that.

Re: Linus: Don't Use ZFS

#408

Post by sokoloff »

HorstG wrote: post #233
timc3 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back when I setup my last ZFS running on OmniOS 5 disks was not optimal, though i am running RAIDZ2 But yes, lots of RAM

I think the optimal number of RAIDz5 disks is 3, if you just want performance. But this wastes lots of space of course. Also, the number of SAS/SATA-channels per controller and the topology of expanders is important. Thats why I don't think there is a recipy, you have to try it out for each new kind of hardware. And as another thread pointed out, stripe size is also an important parameter.

I think you mean RAIDZ1, not 5.

Re: Linus: Don't Use ZFS

#409

Post by sokoloff »

bitL wrote: post #400
stiray wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Both ZFS and BTRFS are essentially Oracle now. BTRFS was an effort largely from Oracle to copy SUN's ZFS advantages in a crappy way which became moot once their acquired SUN. ZFS also requires (a lot of) ECC memory for reliable operation. It's a great tech, pity it's dying slow death.

I’d argue that other file systems also require ECC RAM to maximize reliability. Zfs just makes it much more explicit in their docs and surfaces errors rather than silently handing back any memory corrupted data.

Re: Linus: Don't Use ZFS

#410

Post by [deleted] »

zamalek wrote: post #310
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…

> ZFS has a CDDL license Java is GPLv2+CPE. That didn't stop Oracle because, as Linus pointed out in the email, Oracle regards their APIs as a separate entity to their code.

[deleted]
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