Linus: Don't Use ZFS • Hacker News Board

Re: Linus: Don't Use ZFS

#291

Post by dathinab » Fri, Jan 10, 2020, 3:56 AM UTC

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #70

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…

> 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…

> 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.

It's less a think Linux can work on then a think lawmakers/courts would have to make binding decisions on, which would make it clear if this usage is Ok or not. But in practice this can only be decided on a case-by-case basis.

The only way Linux could work on this is by:

1. Adding a exception to there GPL license to exclude kernel modules from GPL constraints (which obviously won't happen for a bunch of reasons).

2. Turn Linux into a micro kernel with user-land drivers and interfaces for that drivers which are not license encumbered (which again won't happen because this would be a completely different system)

3. Oracle re-licensing ZFS under a permissible Open Source license (e.g. dual license it, doesn't need to be GPL, just GPL compatible e.g. Apache v2). Guess, what that won't happen either, or at last I would be very surprised. I mean Oracle is running out of products people _want_ to buy from them and increasingly run into an area where they (ab-)use the license/copyright/patent system to earn their monny and force people to buy there products (or at last somehow pay license fees to them).

Re: Linus: Don't Use ZFS

#292

Post by toast0 » Fri, Jan 10, 2020, 3:58 AM UTC

nabla9 wrote: post #109

Honestly, at this point if I can't get ZFS in Linux I would move to FreeBSD whenever I need big filesystem. How does Linux® Binary Compatibility layer work on FreeBSD?

I've run Oracle JRE and OpenJDK with it and both work OK; also some BlackBerry SDK tools built for Linux. I'm sure there's some rough edges, and I don't know about performance, but once I mounted the appropriate filesystems, things were working, and that was good enough for me. I think that you do have to pick between a current release of FreeBSD and 64-bit Linux binaries or an older release of FreeBSD and 32-bit Linux binaries, and no way to support both sizes on the same host; but that might be me misremembering.

Re: Linus: Don't Use ZFS

#293

Post by lizknope » Fri, Jan 10, 2020, 4:00 AM UTC

admax88q wrote: post #277

cookiecaper wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly just use ZFS. We've wasted enough effort over obscure licensing minutia.

> We've wasted enough effort over obscure licensing minutia. Which was precisely Sun/Oracle's goal when they released ZFS under the purposefully GPL incompatible CDDL. Sun was hoping to make OpenSolaris the next Linux whilst ensuring that no code from OpenSolaris could be moved back to linux. I can't think of another plausible reason why they would write a new open source license for their open source operating syste…

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

Some people argue that Sun (or the Sun engineer) as creator of the license made the CDDL intentionally GPL incompatible.[13] According to Danese Cooper one of the reasons for basing the CDDL on the Mozilla license was that the Mozilla license is GPL-incompatible. Cooper stated, at the 6th annual Debian conference, that the engineers who had written the Solaris kernel requested that the license of OpenSolaris be GPL-incompatible.[18]

    Mozilla was selected partially because it is GPL incompatible. That was part
    of the design when they released OpenSolaris. ... the engineers who wrote Solaris 
    ... had some biases about how it should be released, and you have to respect that.

Re: Linus: Don't Use ZFS

#294

Post by waste_monk » Fri, Jan 10, 2020, 4:03 AM UTC

Polylactic_acid wrote: post #246

smileybarry wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 centr…

Wait is this the pack that gets screen resizing and copy/paste working?

You're thinking of the Guest Additions which is part of the base Virtualbox package and free for commercial use.

The (commercially licensed) Extensions pack provide "Support for USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 devices, VirtualBox RDP, disk encryption, NVMe and PXE boot for Intel cards"[1] and some other functionality e.g. webcam passthrough [2]. There may be additional functionality enabled by the Extension pack I cannot find at a glance, but those are the main things.

[1] https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads [2] https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch01.html#intro-installing

Re: Linus: Don't Use ZFS

#295

Post by ac29 » Fri, Jan 10, 2020, 4:03 AM UTC

liuliu wrote: post #166

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…

bcachefs should be heavily supported, it doesn't get nearly enough for what it supposes to do: https://www.patreon.com/bcachefs

Many of the advanced features aren't implemented yet though, like compression, encryption, snapshots, RAID5/6....

Re: Linus: Don't Use ZFS

#296

Post by dathinab » Fri, Jan 10, 2020, 4:06 AM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #110

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But it is a problem that you can't reliably have out-of-tree modules. That is the bit I'm trying to get at. Yes it would be best if ZFS was just part of Linux, and maybe some day it can be after Oracle is dead and gone (or under a new leadership and strategy). But it's almost beside the point. Every other OS supports installing drivers that aren't "part" of the OS. I don't understand why Linux is so hostile to this…

I'm not sure Linux is especially hostile. A new OS version of, say, Windows can absolutely break drivers from a previous version.

Linux is generally not happy about seeing any out of tree drivers.

But that is also not without reason, in a certain way Linux balances in a field where they are and want to stay open source. But a lot of users (and someteimes the companies paying some "contributors", too) are companies which are not always that happy about open source. So if it's easy to not put drivers under permissive licenses and still get a good experience out of it they will have very little sensitive to ever make any in-tree GBL drivers and Linux would run at risk of becoming a skeleton you can't use without accepting/buying drivers from multiple 3rd parties.

Through take that argument with a (large) grain of salt, there are counter arguments for it, too. E.g. the LLVM project with is much more permissive and still maintained well, but then is also a very different kind of software.

Re: Linus: Don't Use ZFS

#297

Post by paulmd » Fri, Jan 10, 2020, 4:08 AM UTC

kjs3 wrote: post #264

blibble wrote: post #2

I'll give up Linux on my servers before I give up ZFS especially so given the recent petulant attitude that broke API compatibility in the LTS branch just to spite the ZFS developers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20186458 compete honestly on technical merit, rather than pulling dirty tricks that you'd expect of Oracle or 1990's MS

Yeah...I use FreeBSD for file servers because I don't have to even pay attention this constant ZFSonLinux drama. I treat them like almost like appliances. Linux servers are more than happy to use them on the back-end.

how do you structure that? block images served by iscsi? shares served by nfs/samba?

Re: Linus: Don't Use ZFS

#298

Post by dathinab » Fri, Jan 10, 2020, 4:09 AM UTC

XorNot wrote: post #213

thenewnewguy wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an "approved" method - write an publish your own kernel module. However if your module is not GPL licensed it cannot be published in the linux kernel itself, and you must keep up with the maintenance of the code. This is a relatively fair requirement imo.

...which is what the ZFS on Linux team are doing? The issue here is which parts of the kernel API are allowed for non-GPL modules has been decided to be a moving target from version to version, which might as well be interpreted as "just don't bother anymore".

I wonder if this was exactly what they intended, i.e.: "just don't bother anymore to write out of tree driver and put them under GBL into the tree". And ZFS might just have been accidentally hit by this but is in a situation where it can't put thinks into the tree...

Re: Linus: Don't Use ZFS

#299

Post by awused » Fri, Jan 10, 2020, 4:09 AM UTC

bayindirh wrote: post #57

znpy wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

people probably will, in a few years. rotational disks are getting cheaper and cheaper, 10TB disks in two years might cost as little as 2TB disks today (i got a 2TB disk for like 50€ off Amazon).

> people probably will, in a few years. Yes, but without the array as you stated. We have 300+ 10TB disks at our datacenter today and, ZFS is relevant at this disk count, I/O and client load. Running ZFS at small scale is raising a cow at home for a bucket of raw milk. It's more of a fun curiosity rather than a production level operation. I'd run LVM or md or something similar at home instead of a full blown ZFS setu…

I think ZFS - or at least the set of features ZFS provides - is relevant at any size or disk count all the way down to a single disk in a laptop. I've previously run ZFS on single block devices, though nowadays all my personal machines use at least ZFS mirroring. Without redundancy it can't recover from damage on its own, but checksums and free snapshots are irreplaceable to me.

It doesn't have to be ZFS in particular, I'll gladly switch my Linux systems over once a proper alternative is in the kernel. But right now it's the only working, mature solution. Bcachefs isn't ready yet and BTRFS isn't trustworthy.

Re: Linus: Don't Use ZFS

#300

Post by mehhh » Fri, Jan 10, 2020, 4:12 AM UTC

kalleboo wrote: post #267

disordinary wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's differing opinions of BTRFS's suitability in production - it's the default filesystem of SUSE on one hand, on the other RedHat has deprecated BTRFS support because they see it as not being production ready and they don't see it being production ready in the near future. They also feel that the more legacy linux filesystems have added features to compete.

It's also the default file system of millions of Synology NASes running in consumer hands (although Synology shimmed on their own RAID5/6 support)

Kroger (and their subsidiaries like QFC, Fred Meyer, Fry's Marketplace, etc), Walmart, Safeway (and Albertsons/Randalls) all use Suse with BTRFS for their point of sale systems.