The annual reminder that if Oracle wanted to contribute positively to the Linux ecosystem, they would update the CDDL license ZFS uses to GPL compatible.
ZFS 2.3 released with ZFS raidz expansion
61–70 of 331 posts
Re: ZFS 2.3 released with ZFS raidz expansion
#62Can someone describe why they would use ZFS (or similar) for home usage?
To give an answer that nobody else has given, ZFS is great for storing Steam games. Set recordsize=1M and compression=zstd and you can often store about 33% more games in the same space.
A friend uses ZFS to store his Steam games on a couple of hard drives. He gave ZFS a SSD to use as L2ARC. ZFS automatically caches the games he likes to run on the SSD so that they load quickly. If he changes which games he likes to run, ZFS will automatically adapt to cache those on the SSD instead.
Re: ZFS 2.3 released with ZFS raidz expansion
#63I just don't get it how the Windows world - by far the largest PC platform per userbase - still doesn't have any answer to ZFS. Microsoft had WinFS and then ReFS but it's on the backburner and while there is active development (Win11 ships some bits time to time) release is nowhere in sight. There are some lone warriors trying the giant task of creating a ZFS compatibility layer with some projects, but they are far f…
> I just don't get it how the Windows world - by far the largest PC platform per userbase - still doesn't have any answer to ZFS.
The mainline Linux kernel doesn't either, and I think the answer is because it's hard and high risk with a return mostly measured in technical respect?
Re: ZFS 2.3 released with ZFS raidz expansion
#64I just don't get it how the Windows world - by far the largest PC platform per userbase - still doesn't have any answer to ZFS. Microsoft had WinFS and then ReFS but it's on the backburner and while there is active development (Win11 ships some bits time to time) release is nowhere in sight. There are some lone warriors trying the giant task of creating a ZFS compatibility layer with some projects, but they are far f…
Honest question. As an end user that uses Windows and Linux and does not uses ZFS, what I am missing?
Re: ZFS 2.3 released with ZFS raidz expansion
#65I just don't get it how the Windows world - by far the largest PC platform per userbase - still doesn't have any answer to ZFS. Microsoft had WinFS and then ReFS but it's on the backburner and while there is active development (Win11 ships some bits time to time) release is nowhere in sight. There are some lone warriors trying the giant task of creating a ZFS compatibility layer with some projects, but they are far f…
> I just don't get it how the Windows world - by far the largest PC platform per userbase - still doesn't have any answer to ZFS. The mainline Linux kernel doesn't either, and I think the answer is because it's hard and high risk with a return mostly measured in technical respect?
Technically speaking, bcachefs has been merged into the Linux Kernel - that makes your initial assertion wrong.
But considering it's had two drama events within 1 year of getting merged... I think we can safely confirm your conclusion of it being really hard
Re: ZFS 2.3 released with ZFS raidz expansion
#66I just don't get it how the Windows world - by far the largest PC platform per userbase - still doesn't have any answer to ZFS. Microsoft had WinFS and then ReFS but it's on the backburner and while there is active development (Win11 ships some bits time to time) release is nowhere in sight. There are some lone warriors trying the giant task of creating a ZFS compatibility layer with some projects, but they are far f…
NTFS is good enough for most people, who have a laptop with one SSD in it.
Re: ZFS 2.3 released with ZFS raidz expansion
#67This is huge news for ZFS users (probably mostly those in the hobbyist/home use space, but still). raidz expansion has been one of the most requested features for years.
I'm not yet familiar with zfs and couldn't find it in the release note: Does expansion only works with disk of the same size? Or is adding are bigger/smaller disks possible or do all disk need to have the same size?
You can use different sized disks, but RAID-Z will truncate the space it uses to the lowest common denominator. If you increase the lowest common denominator, RAID-Z should auto-expand to use the additional space. All parity RAID technologies truncate members to the lowest common denominator, rather than just ZFS.
Re: ZFS 2.3 released with ZFS raidz expansion
#68It's good to see that they were pretty conservative about the expansion. Not only is expansion completely transparent and resumable, it also maintains redundancy throughout the process. That said, there is one tiny caveat people should be aware of: > After the expansion completes, old blocks remain with their old data-to-parity ratio (e.g. 5-wide RAIDZ2, has 3 data to 2 parity), but distributed among the larger set o…
I'm not sure that's really a caveat, it just means old data might be in an inoptimal layout. Even with that, you still get the full benefits of raidzN, where up to N disks can completely fail and the pool will remain functional.
Is that the case? What if I expand a 3-1 array to 3-2? Won't the old blocks remain 3-1?
Re: ZFS 2.3 released with ZFS raidz expansion
#69The annual reminder that if Oracle wanted to contribute positively to the Linux ecosystem, they would update the CDDL license ZFS uses to GPL compatible.
This is the annual reply that Oracle cannot change the OpenZFS license because OpenZFS contributors removed the “or any later version” part of the license from their contributions.
By the way, comments such as yours seem to assume that Oracle is somehow involved with OpenZFS. Oracle has no connection with OpenZFS outside of owning copyright on the original OpenSolaris sources and a few tiny commits their employees contributed before Oracle purchased Sun. Oracle has its own internal ZFS fork and they have zero interest in bringing it to Linux. They want people to either go on their cloud or buy this:
Re: ZFS 2.3 released with ZFS raidz expansion
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I just don't get it how the Windows world - by far the largest PC platform per userbase - still doesn't have any answer to ZFS. The mainline Linux kernel doesn't either, and I think the answer is because it's hard and high risk with a return mostly measured in technical respect?
Technically speaking, bcachefs has been merged into the Linux Kernel - that makes your initial assertion wrong. But considering it's had two drama events within 1 year of getting merged... I think we can safely confirm your conclusion of it being really hard
> Technically speaking, bcachefs has been merged into the Linux Kernel - that makes your initial assertion wrong.
bcachefs doesn't implement its erasure coding/RAID yet? Doesn't implement send/receive. Doesn't implement scrub/fsck. See: https://bcachefs.org/Roadmap, https://bcachefs.org/Wishlist/
btrfs is still more of a legit competitor to ZFS these days and it isn't close to touching ZFS where it matters. If the perpetually half-finished bcachefs and btrfs are the "answer" to ZFS that seems like too little, too late to me.