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Linus: Don't Use ZFS

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Re: Linus: Don't Use ZFS

#171

Post by ploxiln »

Hamuko wrote: post #7
Jonnax wrote: post #4

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…

That's his reasoning for not merging ZFS code, not for generally avoiding ZFS.

It's exactly that, when combined with the longstanding practice of maintaining compatibility with userspace, but reserving the right to refactor kernel-space code whenever and wherever needed. If ZFS-on-linux breaks in a subtle or obvious way due to a change in linux, he can't afford to care about that - keeping the linux kernel codebase sane while adding new features, supported hardware, optimizations, and fixes at an honestly scary rate, is not that easy.

See also https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/stable-api-no...

(fuse is a stable user-space API if you want one ... it won't have the same performance and capabilities of course ...)

Re: Linus: Don't Use ZFS

#172

Post by smileybarry »

thu2111 wrote: post #140
organsnyder wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well ... that sounds initially unreasonable, but then if I think about it a bit more I'm not sure how you'd actually enforce a non-commercial use only license without some basic heuristic like "companies are commercial". Is the expectation here that firms offering software under non-commercial-use-is-free licenses just run it entirely on the honour system? And isn't it true that many firms use unlicensed software, he…

IIRC VirtualBox offers to download the Extension Pack without stating it's not free for commercial use. There isn't even a link to the EULA in the download dialog as far as I can tell (from Google Images, at least). Conversely, VirtualBox itself is free for commercial use. Feels more like a honeypot than license auditing.

They can also apply stronger heuristics, like popping up a dialogue box if the computer is centrally-managed (e.g.: Mac MDM, Windows domain, Windows Pro/Enterprise, etc.).

Re: Linus: Don't Use ZFS

#173

Post by jojobas »

denkmoon wrote: post #143
zelly wrote: post #138

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." What does that mean?

Probably something about TRIM.

Re: Linus: Don't Use ZFS

#174

Post by mikedilger »

ZFS functionality dwarfs the minor issues Linus has with it in my opinion. I find it to be well maintained, and not just bug fixes but new features keep being added as well. If I couldn't use ZFS on linux anymore, I wouldn't hesitate to setup another system just so I could keep using ZFS.

Re: Linus: Don't Use ZFS

#175

Post by wang_li »

bayindirh wrote: post #39
rkagerer wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He also feels ZFS "was always more of a buzzword than anything else". Yikes.

Honestly, I wouldn't bash him for this comment. Not everyone runs a 10+ TB array at their home for storage and backup purposes. ZFS doesn't primarily target single disks and small arrays anyway. :)

It's great on small disks, using ZFS root on solaris 11 in my day job, I can tell you it makes management a lot easier. Patching and rollbacks are like eating a nice dessert.

Re: Linus: Don't Use ZFS

#176

Post by p_l »

the8472 wrote: post #62
dsr_ wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the surface, btrfs is pretty close to zfs. Once you actually use them, you discover all the ways that btrfs is a pain and zfs is a (minor) joy: - snapshot management - online scrub - data integrity - disk management I lost data from perfectly healthy-appearing btrfs systems twice. I've never lost data on maintained zfs systems, and I now trust a lot more data to zfs than I ever have to btrfs.

At least disk management is far easier with btrfs. You can restripe at will while zfs has severe limitations around resizing, adding and removing devices. Granted, at enterprise scale this hardly matters because you can just send-receive to rebuild pools if you have enough spares, but for consumer-grade deployments it's a non-negligible annoyance.

Restriping is source of unsafety, though. A lot of ZFS data safety comes from the fact it doesn't support overwriting anything, making it so that normal operation can't introduce unrecoverable corruption. In fact, all writes are done through snapshots.

Re: Linus: Don't Use ZFS

#177

Post by celticmusic »

gh123man wrote: post #77
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And I'm not at all interested in some "ZFS shim layer" thing either If there is no "approved" method for creating Linux drivers under licenses other than the GPL, that seems like a major problem that Linux should be working to address. Expecting all Linux drivers to be GPL-licensed is unrealistic and just leads to crappy user experiences. nVidia is never going to release full-featured GPL'd drivers, and even corpor…

I am also not an expert in this space - but if I understand correctly the reason the linux Nvidia driver sucks so much is that it is not GPL'd (or open source at all). There is little incentive for Nvidia to maintain a linux specific driver, but because it is closed source the community cannot improve/fix it. > Why are all drivers expected to use the GPL? I think the answer to this is: drivers are expect to use the G…

My experience is that linux nvidia drivers are better than the competitors open source drivers.

Re: Linus: Don't Use ZFS

#178

Post by nottorp »

btilly wrote: post #35
Hamuko wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's his reasoning for not merging ZFS code, not for generally avoiding ZFS.

Here are his reasons for generally avoiding ZFS from what I consider most important to least. - The kernel team may break it at any time, and won't care if they do. - It doesn't seem to be well-maintained. - Performance is not that great compared to the alternatives. - Using it opens you up to the threat of lawsuits from Oracle. Given history, this is a real threat. (This is one that should be high for Linus but not…

> There is no conceivable reason that Oracle would want to threaten me with a lawsuit.

I don't think it has to be conceivable with Oracle...

Unfortunately I have to agree with Linus on this one. Messing with Oracle's stuff is dangerous if you can't afford a comparable legal team.

Re: Linus: Don't Use ZFS

#179

Post by grizzles »

It's too bad. ZFS is amazing and so ridiculously simple to use and manage if you can find the recent docs among all the old docs online.

Anyone using Stratis? Just noticed it recently went to 2.0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratis_(configuration_daemon) Curious to know how it handles device failures, removals, additions and so on.

Re: Linus: Don't Use ZFS

#180

Post by m0zg »

stock_toaster wrote: post #167
m0zg wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much my view as well. If Linux becomes incompatible with ZFS in any way, I'll switch to FreeBSD. That said, after the Oracle Java debacle, I can see why Linus would not be receptive towards merging ZFS into the kernel. I just wish he argued the point on legal issues alone instead of making up stories about non-existent technical flaws in ZFS. The whole thing is basically a work of art. Oracle should consider G…

> Oracle should consider GPL-ing it and integrating it into Linux directly I think Apache (or BSD/MIT) would be far more palatable, as GPL'ing it would cut off the BSDs as well as OpenSolaris, which would certainly be a bummer.

Por que no los dos? It's their IP, they can license it under several licenses to maximize adoption. This being Oracle though, I don't think it'll ever happen.
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