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ZFS: Apple's new filesystem that wasn't (2016)

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Re: ZFS: Apple's new filesystem that wasn't (2016)

#51

Post by ahl »

secabeen wrote: post #47

ZFS remains an excellent filesystem for bulk storage on rust, but were I Apple at the time, I would probably want to focus on something built for the coming era of flash and NVMe storage. There are a number of axioms built into ZFS that come out of the spinning disk era that still hold it back for flash-only filesystems.

Certainly one would build something different starting in 2025 rather than 2001, but do you have specific examples of how ZFS’s design holds it back? I think it has been adapted extremely well for the changing ecosystem.

Re: ZFS: Apple's new filesystem that wasn't (2016)

#52

Post by cherryteastain »

wkat4242 wrote: post #48
em500 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux or FreeBSD developers are free to adopt ZFS as their primary file systems. But it appears that practical benefits are not really evident to most users.

That's called marketing. Give it a snazzy name, like say "TimeMachine" and users will jump on it. Also, ZFS has a bad name within the Linux community due to some licensing stuff. I find that most BSD users don't really care about such legalese and most people I know that run FreeBSD are running ZFS on root. Which works amazingly well I might add. Especially with something like sanoid added to it, it basically does th…

> ZFS has a bad name within the Linux community due to some licensing stuff

This is out of an abundance of caution. Canonical bundle ZFS in the Ubuntu kernel and no one sued them (yet).

Re: ZFS: Apple's new filesystem that wasn't (2016)

#53

Post by wkat4242 »

cherryteastain wrote: post #52
wkat4242 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's called marketing. Give it a snazzy name, like say "TimeMachine" and users will jump on it. Also, ZFS has a bad name within the Linux community due to some licensing stuff. I find that most BSD users don't really care about such legalese and most people I know that run FreeBSD are running ZFS on root. Which works amazingly well I might add. Especially with something like sanoid added to it, it basically does th…

> ZFS has a bad name within the Linux community due to some licensing stuff This is out of an abundance of caution. Canonical bundle ZFS in the Ubuntu kernel and no one sued them (yet).

True and I understand the caution considering Oracle is involved which are an awful company to do deal with (and their takeover of Sun was a disaster).

But really, this is a concern for distros. Not for end users. Yet many of the Linux users I speak to are somehow worried about this. Most can't even describe the provisions of the GPL so I don't really know what that's about. Just something they picked up, I guess.

Re: ZFS: Apple's new filesystem that wasn't (2016)

#54

Post by m4rtink »

em500 wrote: post #40
thyristan wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both are imho linked to "offline desktop use cases are not important anymore". Both companies saw their future gains elsewhere, in internet-related functions and what became known as "cloud". No need to have a fancy, featurefull and expensive filesystem when it is only to be used as a cache for remote cloud stuff.

Linux or FreeBSD developers are free to adopt ZFS as their primary file systems. But it appears that practical benefits are not really evident to most users.

The ZFS license makes it impossible to include in upstream Linux kernel, which makes it much less usable as primary filesystem.

Re: ZFS: Apple's new filesystem that wasn't (2016)

#55

Post by thyristan »

wkat4242 wrote: post #53
cherryteastain wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ZFS has a bad name within the Linux community due to some licensing stuff This is out of an abundance of caution. Canonical bundle ZFS in the Ubuntu kernel and no one sued them (yet).

True and I understand the caution considering Oracle is involved which are an awful company to do deal with (and their takeover of Sun was a disaster). But really, this is a concern for distros. Not for end users. Yet many of the Linux users I speak to are somehow worried about this. Most can't even describe the provisions of the GPL so I don't really know what that's about. Just something they picked up, I guess.

Licensing concerns that prevent distros from using ZFS will sooner or later also have adverse effects on end users. Actually those effects are already there: The constant need to adapt a large patchset to the current kernel, meaning updates are a hassle. The lack of packaging in distributions, meaning updates are a hassle. And the lack of integration and related tooling, meaning many features can not be used (like a/b boots from snapshots after updates) easily, and installers won't know about ZFS so you have to install manually.

None of this is a worry about being sued as an end user. But all of those are worries that you life will be harder with ZFS, and a lot harder as soon as the first lawsuits hit anyone, because all the current (small) efforts to keep it working will cease immediately.

Re: ZFS: Apple's new filesystem that wasn't (2016)

#56

Post by dizhn »

hs86 wrote: post #9
jitl wrote: post #2

Besides the licensing issue, I wonder if optimizing ZFS for low latency + low RAM + low power on iPhone was an uphill battle or if it’s easy. My experiencing running ZFS years ago was poor latency and large RAM use with my NAS, but that hardware and drive configuration was optimized for low $ per gb stored and used parity stuff.

While its deduplication feature clearly demands more memory, my understanding is that the ZFS ARC is treated by the kernel as a driver with a massive, persistent memory allocation that cannot be swapped out ("wired" pages). Unlike the regular file system cache, ARC's eviction is not directly managed by the kernel. Instead, ZFS itself is responsible for deciding when and how to shrink the ARC. This can lead to problem…

Maz arc size is configurable and it does not need the mythical 1GB per TB to function well.

Re: ZFS: Apple's new filesystem that wasn't (2016)

#57

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

thfuran wrote: post #34
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a rule of thumb that you should have at least 1 GB of RAM per TB of disk when using deduplication . That's.... Different.

So you've never seen the people saying you should steer clear of ZFS unless you're going to have an enormous ARC even when talking about personal media servers?

Not that I recall? And it's worked fine for me...

Re: ZFS: Apple's new filesystem that wasn't (2016)

#58

Post by m4rtink »

ghaff wrote: post #36
ahl wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ZFS was developed in Solaris, and at the time we were mostly selling SPARC systems. That changed rapidly and the biggest commercial push was in the form of the ZFS Storage Appliance that our team (known as Fishworks) built at Sun. Those systems were based on AMD servers that Sun was making at the time such as Thumper [1]. Also in 2016, Ubuntu leaned in to use of ZFS for containers [2]. There was nothing that specific…

Yeah I think if it hadn’t been for the combination of Oracle and CDDL, Red Hat would have been more interested in for Linux. As it was they basically went with XFS and volume management. Fedora did eventually go with btrfs but dints know if there are are any plans for copy-on-write FS for RHEL at any point.

Fedora Server uses XFS on LVM by default & you can do CoW with any modern filesystem on top of an LVM thin pool.

And there is also the Stratis project Red Hat is involved in: https://stratis-storage.github.io/

Re: ZFS: Apple's new filesystem that wasn't (2016)

#59

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

wkat4242 wrote: post #48
em500 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux or FreeBSD developers are free to adopt ZFS as their primary file systems. But it appears that practical benefits are not really evident to most users.

That's called marketing. Give it a snazzy name, like say "TimeMachine" and users will jump on it. Also, ZFS has a bad name within the Linux community due to some licensing stuff. I find that most BSD users don't really care about such legalese and most people I know that run FreeBSD are running ZFS on root. Which works amazingly well I might add. Especially with something like sanoid added to it, it basically does th…

> I find that most BSD users don't really care about such legalese and most people I know that run FreeBSD are running ZFS on root.

I don't think it's that they don't care, it's that the CDDL and BSD-ish licenses are generally believed to just not have the conflict that CDDL and GPL might. (IANAL, make your own conclusions about whether either of those are true)

Re: ZFS: Apple's new filesystem that wasn't (2016)

#60

Post by ghaff »

m4rtink wrote: post #58
ghaff wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I think if it hadn’t been for the combination of Oracle and CDDL, Red Hat would have been more interested in for Linux. As it was they basically went with XFS and volume management. Fedora did eventually go with btrfs but dints know if there are are any plans for copy-on-write FS for RHEL at any point.

Fedora Server uses XFS on LVM by default & you can do CoW with any modern filesystem on top of an LVM thin pool. And there is also the Stratis project Red Hat is involved in: https://stratis-storage.github.io/

It looks like btrfs is/was the default for just Fedora Workstation. I’m less connected to Red Hat filesystem details than I used to be.
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