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"Is Linux getting too old for you?

Someone else pointed this out..

Are you interested to see what other systems such as OpenSolaris have to offer?

Oooh, what features might those be?

OpenSolaris has some great features, such as ZFS and dtrace, which make it a great server OS â" but how do you think it will fare on a laptop?

ZFS? How about for Linux, or Mac OS X

DTrace? How about:

$ uname
Darwin
$ which dtrace
/usr/sbin/dtrace
Apparently Linux has no equal, but I've been a Linux sysadmin for many years and didn't have dtrace before, and even now that I have it on my Macbook, I still haven't even learned how to use it, but I understand it can require programming in a C-like language. No thanks. I do programming in Shell, Ruby and Perl, usually in that order. I don't want to relearn C, since I never really liked it to begin with.

ZFS and DTrace aren't compelling reasons to use a particular OS on a workstation (laptop OR desktop) anyway. Userland utility is what uh, users want. Mac OS certainly delivers for both the typical user that wants their browser, IM and music, but they're never going to install Solaris anyway. So your target audience can either pick the "newcomer" who isn't that new, or stick with what they're already using, and use it to get some actual work done, instead of screwing around with other OS's.

ZFS is available on Linux via FUSE. I've experimented with it myself. It only works on sparc and x86 architectures, though. I found this out after trying to compile it for my NSLU2.

There's a blog, a wiki, and a google group.

ZFS is the only filesystem I would trust with a large amount of data. We have several ZFS storage units here at work, and I've built a few myself. Personally, I'd run Solaris x86 in a VM and export filesystems via NFS before I'd run anything else.

I'm really wishing it'd get into Linux too, but I don't think it's going to happen.

First there's the licensing issue, so the whole thing would likely have to be done from scratch.

Also, last I heard the Linux devs aren't very impressed with ZFS, one of them even went so far as to call it a "rampant layering violation".

You can get support with FUSE here, but I'm not sure how well it works, and I've heard FUSE isn't very fast.

ZFS is available via FUSE.

http://www.wizy.org/wiki/ZFS_on_FUSE
Works ok on x86, sparc(Linux) version is there but had some problems
a few version back, Haven't checked the latest build so the sparc(Linux) version
might be ok now.

Enjoy!

ZFS is newer. no partitions!!

MACFuse
http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/
"beta"

ZFS on Fuse
http://www.wizy.org/wiki/ZFS_on_FUSE
"beta"

sshfs on macfuse is pretty slick, lemme tell ya.

ZFS is licensed under the CDDL, and hence cannot (legally) be integrated into the Linux kernel. It's possible to get ZFS running on Linux systems *right now* using FUSE, but unless/until Sun's licensing terms change (note - they may) what you ask for is not possible.

As other posters have mentioned, LVM + MD is a fairly good solution. It's clearly not as easy to work with as ZFS, but it's adequate for most needs and is extensively documented.

I seriously doubt Sun cares to add zfs to linux.

Why bother? There's a ZFS-on-FUSE/Linux project that has ZFS working, and is working on making it worth using. It's not clear that having a native filesystem is necessarily faster than a userspace driver, although FUSE probably still needs some work.

The driver already supports numerous features (including RAID, pooling, snapshots and more) and is still under development.

Hopefully this guy will finish his port of ZFS to FUSE on Linux someday, in which case a lot of the work will have been done. You will still have to do some cleanup to make it run again in kernel space, and port it to the Linux VFS layer, of course. His choice of FUSE is in part due to the license, I imagine. A kernel port of the ZFS code could never go into the Linux kernel due to the license issues between the CDDL and GPL, where as this is perfectly fine in userspace.

That said, it's too bad the FUSE port has stalled (no commits for 5 weeks now). I want ZFS bad, but trying to admin a Solaris box feels like having my hands chopped off. Nothing is where I expect it to be.