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In Praise of ZFS on Linux's ZED 'ZFS Event Daemon'

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Re: In Praise of ZFS on Linux's ZED 'ZFS Event Daemon'

#21

Post by DonHopkins »

acd wrote: post #11

Insightful article. Zfs is the best file system. Ability to know that you do not have silent file corruption. Running without raid controllers. Feature to take snapshots super fast without waiting and that take little extra space. You can use Cache SSD with ZFS for read acceleration of physical disk. Transparent file compression. Good command line interface. Now you can take good actions with ZED for example sending…

That's a big checklist of features, but can it murder your wife?

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Comparison_of_fil...

Re: In Praise of ZFS on Linux's ZED 'ZFS Event Daemon'

#22

Post by thr0w3345 »

wfn wrote: post #19
arianvanp wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand where minio suddenly comes from? Minio is barely documented. I had to ask in Slack to interpret what it meant when minio said "your cluster is 5 red and 7 yellow" as the colours aren't event documented. Every minio cluster I hosted had dataloss. Each one has lead to a reported issue on their GitHub that hasn't been closed to date. Nothing about recovery is documented. Documentation is slim in gener…

Could you expand more re: your minio experience? We're about to enter production with minio as our S3 interface-providing file storage system, and have found documentation to be sufficient. However, I'm slightly concerned that we haven't tested it enough, and that doc and support may prove to be lacking (like in your case) when we hit edge cases and failure scenarios.

I highly recommend you look at leofs instead — it’s been absolutely rock solid for us.

Re: In Praise of ZFS on Linux's ZED 'ZFS Event Daemon'

#23

Post by throw0101a »

capitol_ wrote: post #18
spindle wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's trivial to use ZFS on NixOS, including on the root partition. The legal position is that ZFS is open source under a copyleft license but that many people think that it's illegal to bundle it with the Linux kernel because of some (I think unintended) incompatibilities between its license and the Linux kernel's license. Canonical (and some others) disagree, and think that it's legal. It's only the bundling that's…

The incompatibility was very much intended, Sun needed a way to compete with linux and didn't want to be assimilated into the linux ecosystem, so they released opensolaris under CDDL instead of GPL or MIT. Oracle haven't re-licensed it for their own reasons. Here is some more info on the subject: https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2016/feb/25/zfs-and-linux/

> The incompatibility was very much intended

Nope. Simon Phipps, Sun's Chief Open Source Officer at the time, and the boss of Danese Cooper—who is the source of the claims it was intended—has stated it was not:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Development_and_Distrib...

Brian Cantrill, the co-author of Dtrace, has also stated that that they were expecting the Linux folks to potentially incorporate their work:

* https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/31ny87#cq3bs9z

Do you have any citations that can corroborate the/your claim that incompatibility was intended?

> Here is some more info on the subject:

See also:

* https://softwarefreedom.org/resources/2016/linux-kernel-cddl...

Re: In Praise of ZFS on Linux's ZED 'ZFS Event Daemon'

#24

Post by curt15 »

diffeomorphism wrote: post #13
acd wrote: post #11

Insightful article. Zfs is the best file system. Ability to know that you do not have silent file corruption. Running without raid controllers. Feature to take snapshots super fast without waiting and that take little extra space. You can use Cache SSD with ZFS for read acceleration of physical disk. Transparent file compression. Good command line interface. Now you can take good actions with ZED for example sending…

Can you comment on btrfs by comparison? Also, what is the status of the license incompatibility/integration of ZFS with distros? Canonical seems to think that shipping it with ubuntu is legal, but other distros seem less sure.

Fedora is proposing to default to btrfs for its next release: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/BtrfsByDefault

Re: In Praise of ZFS on Linux's ZED 'ZFS Event Daemon'

#25

Post by trasz »

spindle wrote: post #14
diffeomorphism wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you comment on btrfs by comparison? Also, what is the status of the license incompatibility/integration of ZFS with distros? Canonical seems to think that shipping it with ubuntu is legal, but other distros seem less sure.

It's trivial to use ZFS on NixOS, including on the root partition. The legal position is that ZFS is open source under a copyleft license but that many people think that it's illegal to bundle it with the Linux kernel because of some (I think unintended) incompatibilities between its license and the Linux kernel's license. Canonical (and some others) disagree, and think that it's legal. It's only the bundling that's…

FWIW, CDDL is pretty much just Mozilla license. The incompatibility is caused by GPL, which, according to FSF, cannot be linked against anything that's not a subset of GPL. You'd get the same incompatibility if ZFS was covered by GPLv3, for example.

Re: In Praise of ZFS on Linux's ZED 'ZFS Event Daemon'

#26

Post by trasz »

viraptor wrote: post #16
spindle wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's trivial to use ZFS on NixOS, including on the root partition. The legal position is that ZFS is open source under a copyleft license but that many people think that it's illegal to bundle it with the Linux kernel because of some (I think unintended) incompatibilities between its license and the Linux kernel's license. Canonical (and some others) disagree, and think that it's legal. It's only the bundling that's…

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#CDDL "This means a module covered by the GPL and a module covered by the CDDL cannot legally be linked together." I don't think the incompatibilities are really unintended. If anyone has enough lawyers and money to relicense something correctly, it's Oracle.

Except then you'd loose the patent protection provided by CDDL. And you'd cause licensing problems for literally everyone else but Linux. And you probably wouldn't gain anything in the long run anyway; AdvFS was released under GPL and went nowhere.

Re: In Praise of ZFS on Linux's ZED 'ZFS Event Daemon'

#27

Post by trasz »

jclulow wrote: post #15

Despite what the article says about illumos not having something analogous, we do actually have something and have had it for more than a decade: https://illumos.org/man/1M/syseventadm It allows programs to be run in response to sysevents, some of which are generated by ZFS and some of which are generated by other parts of the system (e.g., device hotplug).

Sounds similar to FreeBSD's devd(8) (https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?devd).

Re: In Praise of ZFS on Linux's ZED 'ZFS Event Daemon'

#28

Post by louwrentius »

acd wrote: post #11

Insightful article. Zfs is the best file system. Ability to know that you do not have silent file corruption. Running without raid controllers. Feature to take snapshots super fast without waiting and that take little extra space. You can use Cache SSD with ZFS for read acceleration of physical disk. Transparent file compression. Good command line interface. Now you can take good actions with ZED for example sending…

I would advice people to think about what they need.

ZFS is fine, but it is overkill for most home applications and it has a pitfall related to extensibility.

https://louwrentius.com/what-home-nas-builders-should-unders...

https://louwrentius.com/the-hidden-cost-of-using-zfs-for-you...

So it really depends on your needs. Statements as "ZFS is the best filesystem" are so meaningless.

P.S. SSD caching often has no tangible practical benefit for most applications. More RAM is often the better investment. As is with any filesystem.

Re: In Praise of ZFS on Linux's ZED 'ZFS Event Daemon'

#29

Post by m0zg »

louwrentius wrote: post #28
acd wrote: post #11

Insightful article. Zfs is the best file system. Ability to know that you do not have silent file corruption. Running without raid controllers. Feature to take snapshots super fast without waiting and that take little extra space. You can use Cache SSD with ZFS for read acceleration of physical disk. Transparent file compression. Good command line interface. Now you can take good actions with ZED for example sending…

I would advice people to think about what they need. ZFS is fine, but it is overkill for most home applications and it has a pitfall related to extensibility. https://louwrentius.com/what-home-nas-builders-should-unders... https://louwrentius.com/the-hidden-cost-of-using-zfs-for-you... So it really depends on your needs. Statements as "ZFS is the best filesystem" are so meaningless. P.S. SSD caching often has no tang…

> ZFS is fine, but it is overkill for most home applications

Yeah, not having silent data corruption is "overkill", sure. /s Why not use ZFS? It takes 15 seconds to install, and its CLI is fairly intuitive. Works fine. Costs $0. Why not, even for "home" applications?

I could see how it could be unsuitable for "entreprise" applications where there are strict performance requirements etc, but for home, I wish I could use ZFS everywhere.

Re: In Praise of ZFS on Linux's ZED 'ZFS Event Daemon'

#30

Post by paulie_a »

m0zg wrote: post #29
louwrentius wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would advice people to think about what they need. ZFS is fine, but it is overkill for most home applications and it has a pitfall related to extensibility. https://louwrentius.com/what-home-nas-builders-should-unders... https://louwrentius.com/the-hidden-cost-of-using-zfs-for-you... So it really depends on your needs. Statements as "ZFS is the best filesystem" are so meaningless. P.S. SSD caching often has no tang…

> ZFS is fine, but it is overkill for most home applications Yeah, not having silent data corruption is "overkill", sure. /s Why not use ZFS? It takes 15 seconds to install, and its CLI is fairly intuitive. Works fine. Costs $0. Why not, even for "home" applications? I could see how it could be unsuitable for "entreprise" applications where there are strict performance requirements etc, but for home, I wish I could u…

If it's cli it's a nonstarter

Even if it has a gui it's probably a non starter unless there are literally 2 options

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